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Organization Studies http://oss.sagepub.com/

From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis

Robert Chia
Organization Studies 1995 16: 579
DOI: 10.1177/017084069501600406

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 From Modern to Postmodern Organizational
Analysis
Robert Chia*

’A work can become modem 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
)

Abstract

Robert Chia The terms ’modem’ and ’postmodern’ have become common currency in intel-
Department of lectual debates within organization studies. The postmodern is variously inter-
Management and preted as an ’epoch’, a ’perspective’, or a new ’paradigm’ of thought. In this
Organization, paper the author argues that what distinguishes the postmodern from the
The School of
modem is a ’style of thinking’ which eschews the uncritical use of common
Management,
University of organizational terms such as ’organizations’, ’individuals’, ’environment’,
Stirling, Scotland ’structure’, and ’culture’, etc. These terms refer to the existence of social entit-
ies 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 unrepresent-
able in any static sense. Debates about modernism and postmodernism which
do not address this ontological distinction miss critical insights which postmod-
ernism 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 onto-
logical 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 ’modem’ and ‘postmodern’ (Cooper and Burrell 1988), ’strong’
and ’weak’ (Vattimo 1988), ’downstream’ and ’upstream’ (Latour
579- 1987), ’systematic’ and ’edifying’ (Rorty 1980), ’representational’ and
’anti-representational’ (Rorty 1991) and ’representing’ and ’interven-
ing’ (Hacking 1983). These attempted distinctions allude to a straining
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580

towards an, as yet, inadequately elaborated cognitive style and discurs-

ive 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
modem and postmodern can only be expressed through the hegemony
of modernist discourse, their ontological commitments, intellectual pri-
orities and theoretical preoccupations should not be mistakenly con-
flated. In this regard, it is more fruitful to conceive of the modem 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
modem. Yet the modem 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 modem 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 postmodern1
through the cumulative effects of more than three centuries of privil-
eging a dualistic mode of thought.
Although the modem 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 organiza-
tional 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
modem 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 Burrell 1988, 1989). In this paper I argue that what distinguishes
the modem 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 con-
sequences of a postmodern mode of thought for organizational analysis
are then explored in some detail. _ < ..

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 581

’Being’ and ’Becoming’ as Styles of Thought

In a recent paper, Cooper and Law (1995) maintained that the basic
criticism of ’modem’ sociological studies of organization is that they
tend to deal with r-esults or organized states rather than with the com-
plex social processes that lead to these outcomes or effects. In such an
idealized sociology, the ‘state of rest’ is viewed as normal and hence
implicitly privileged in social analyses whilst ’change’ is considered
accidental, transitory or even malfunctional. Thus, properties such as
unity, identity, permanence, structure and essences, etc., are privileged
over dissonance, disparity, plurality, transience and change. Moreover,
these latter processes are conceived of as secondary aspects of primary
social ’states’ rather than their very basis. According to Elias (1978),
Talcott Parsons’s work is one example of this tendency towards an
idealized homeostatic mode of analysis. Elias noted that Parsons’s work
is a ’systematic reduction of social processes to social states, and of
complex heterogeneous phenomena to simpler, seemingly homogen-
eous components’ (p. 228). Following Elias, Cooper and Law (1995)>
have proposed a sociology of becoming in which taken-for-granted
static states are viewed as effects of complex social processes in contrast
to the Parsonian approach which assumes the primacy of the static and
which Cooper and Law therefore call a sociology of being. Cooper and
Law then use this basic opposition to distinguish between distal (an
outcome of a sociology of being or static states) and proximal (an out-
come of a sociology of becoming or process) modes of thinking in

organizational analysis, recognizing all the time that the distal and the
proximal are both complementary yet different ways of looking at
human structures and structuring.
Cooper and Law’s notions of distal and proximal modes of thinking
correspond to what I term here modem and postmodern syles of think-
ing, It is this vast difference in styles of thinking and their associated
ontological commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccu-
pations which separate the concerns of postmodern organizational
writers like Cooper (1986, 1987, 1990, 1992), Cooper and Burrell
(1988, 1989), Cooper and Fox (1990), Law (1994), Linstead (1993),
Cooper and Law (1995) from most other contemporary ’modem’ and
’postmodern’ organizational theorists. For these latter groups of organ-
izational theorists, actions, interactions and the local orchestration of
relationships are characteristically. conceived of as the incidental epi-
phenomena of basic social entities such as ’individuals’, ’actors/agents’
or ’organizations’ rather than as the primary ’stuff’ of the world. Such

organizational theorizing remains irretrievably committed to an onto-

logy of being.
Postmodern thinking, on the other hand, privileges an ontology of
movement, emergence and becoming in which the transient and ephem-
eral nature of what is ’real’ is accentuated. What is real for postmodern
thinkers are not so much social states, or entities, but emergent rela-

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582

tional interactions and pattemings that are recursively intimated in the

fluxing and transforming of our life-worlds. Debates in organization
studies which do not address this fundamental ontological distinction
between modernism and postmodernism tend to gloss over the potential
contributions of a postmodeni ’orientation’ to organizational analysis.
Commitment to a postmodern mode of thinking, however, implies rad-
ical consequences for the study of organization. Instead of the tradi-
tional emphases on the analysis of structures, cultures, gender, ethics,
etc., in organizations, the postmodern emphasizes the myriad of hetero-
geneous yet interlocking organizing micro-practices which collectively
generate effects such as individuals, organizations and society. Post-
modern thinking argues that the tendency to think of these latter cat-
egories as already completed and self-contained social units for the
purpose of social analysis is a consequence of what Whitehead ( 1929)
has called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Whitehead used this
phrase to describe the tendency to see physical objects and things as
the natural units of analysis rather than, more properly, the relationships
between them. It is precisely this fallacy that the postmodern mode of
analysis seeks to overturn.

Thought Styles and Thought Collectives

.

The process of inquiry is often believed to be the product of a dualistic

relationship between the knowing subject and the object to be known.
This view, however, neglects the significance of existing (.0gill .ti.i,c
codes and consequently the style of thinking within a particular com-
munity which serves to shape the very possibilities of individual know-
ing. Cognition, it can be argued, is, therefore, not an individual process
but instead involves the individual, the social collectivity to which he/
she belongs and the socially legitimated objects of inquiry. It is, in
effect, a socially conditioned response to a pre-established ordering of
things.
In his influential analysis of the development of order and organization
in the modem world, Michel Foucault ( 1970) starts with an amused and
perplexed reflection on the writer Jorge Luis Borges’s description of ’a
certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that:

animas are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)
tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in
the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very
fine camelhair brush (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n)
that from a long way off look like flies.’ (Foucault 1970: xv)

Foucault observed that in the wonderment of encountering this strange

taxonomy, ’the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that,
by means of a fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another
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 583

system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility

of thinking tliat’ (Foucault 1970: xv). The shock and strangeness of
confronting a different cultural order reveals the limitations of a particu-
lar thought style when we reach outside the familiar conventions and
ordering codes that define our particular view of the world. The con-
sequences of such vast differences in world views and their impact
on our perception of things has been
extensively explored by Fleck
(1979).
Fleck (1979) points out that individuals are necessarily members of a
thought collective with a particular thought style which, often unbe-
known to the individual, or indeed the entire collective, exerts a com-
pulsive force upon their thinking. When a particular conception per-
meates throughout the thought collective and influences everyday life
and idiom, any contradiction, therefore, appears unthinkable and unima-
ginable. This explains, for example, the harsh reactions to Columbus’s
assertion that the earth was round. People argued:

’Could anyone be mad enough to believe that there are antipodes; people
standing with their feet opposite our own, who walk with their legs sticking
up and their heads hanging down’? Is there really a region on earth where,
things are upside down, where trees grow downwards, and where it rains, hails
and snow upwards’? The delusion that the earth is round is the cause of this
foolish fable.’ (quoted in Fleck 1979: 27)

As Fleck observed, it is possible for us /10W to recognize that the cause

of this difficulty lay in the absolute meaning assumed in concepts such
as ’up’ and ’down’. This example helps illustrate how concepts and
ideas conceived within a different thought style can be easily assimil-
ated into the dominant discourse in such a way as to neutralize claims
which do not fit into the dominant order of things. A process of selective
appropriation frequently occurs whereby concepts and ideas generated
within a different set of ontological commitments and intellectual prior-
ities are systematically appropriated and intellectually subdued to fit the
underlying organizational logic of the dominant thought style. In this
way, an intellectual ’drift’ occurs in which fresh and original ideas
proposed within a diffrent problematic are forcibly grafted and pressed
into service within a context which neither framed nor generated them.
This tendency to selectively abstract ideas, concretize them as essential
aspects of reality and then to take them as appropriate units of analysis,
whilst ignoring and forgetting this process of decontextualization, leads
to what has been previously termed the Fallacy of Misplaced
Concreteness.
It is also a useful way of describing the curious modernist response to
the recent challenge of postmodem thinking, particularly as it is cur-
rently exemplified in the field of organization theory. In recent years,
there has been a notable increase in the number of books and articles
in the organization theory literature which have attempted to address
the question of postmodernism (see, for instance, Clegg 1990-, Grint

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584

1991; Parker 1992; Hassard and Parker 1993). In most instances, a

failure recognize the radical ontological character of postmodern
to
thinking as an alternative thought style, rather than as a different
theoretical perspective or social paradigm, has distracted attention
away from the postmodern problematic and led to an indiscriminate
appropriation of postmodern concepts and terminology into mainstream
organization theory. For instance, the concept of ’de-differentiation’
(Lash 1988, 1990) has been used to describe the ’con-fusion’ of the
real with the representational as a defining feature of the postmodern
condition. Lash (1990) notes that whilst modernism problematizes the
status of representations through a process of ‘differentiation’, postmod-
ernism problematizes the status of reality (p. 18) by ’de-differentiating’
itself from its representations. De-differentiation is, therefore, a term
referring to this conflation of the real with the representational, thereby
raising into focus the question of the ontological status of what is
deemed ’real’ and what is not ’real’ since it becomes increasingly diffi-
cult to distinguish between the two. In Clegg’s (1990) hands, however,
modem ’differentiation’ suddenly becomes reduced to the all-too-
familiar classical organizational question of the ’division of labour’ and
’de-differentiation’ is therefore conveniently cast in opposition to
it.

’It has been proposed, by contrast to the stress on increasing differentiation as

the motif of modernity, that the crucial hallmark of postmodemity may be a
decrease in differentiation. Within tlre world of oi-gatzizatiotis and work this
may be economically translated as a process of&dquo;de-differentiation&dquo;.’ (Clegg
1990: 2, my emphasis)

Abstracted out of its ontological context, the reappropriated concept of

’de-differentiation’ becomes no longer recognizable from the source of
its initial conceptualization. It has become simplified, conventionalized
and neutered by a one-dimensional form of modemist thinking. Clegg’s
incorporation of Lash’s concept of de-differentiation exemplifies Lyot-
ard’s (1992) ’post’ as a process of ’initial forgetting’. Similarly, for
Grint (1991) the postmodern approach to organizational analysis (with
specific reference to Cooper and Burrell’s work) is cast as yet another
’theoretical perspective’ locatable in a two-dimensional framework (p.
117) and contrasted with other organizational perspectives such as con-
tingency theory, action theory, critical theory, etc. In so doing, Grint
overlooks the crucial difference in ’cognitive style’ adopted by Cooper
and Burrell (1988) in their seminal piece. Such unsubtle appropriations
only serve to gloss over the potential contributions of a postmodern
analysis of organization.
My purpose in this paper, therefore, is to reclaim the postmodern prob-
lematic for itself and thereby to forge out a radically different theoret-
ical agenda and an accompanying set of intellectual priorities and theor-
etical foci for organizational analysis which remains more sensitive and
more faithful to the postmodern concern.

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 585

The Concept of an ’Ideally Isolated System’

Within the human sciences, modernism has been associated with the
’triumph of reason’, ’objective scientific logic’, a ’foundational theory
of knowledge’, ’linearity of thought’, ’historical periodization’ and a
’cultural paradigm’. Despite their good intentions, these characteriza-
tions must be understood as outcomes or effects rather than the underly-
ing reasons for a modernist style of thought. What seems to underpin
the modernist predisposition is a poorly articulated or analyzed set of
philosophical injunctions on how to organize and make sense of our
lived experiences. These injunctions derive from a widely held and
deeply entrenched code of ordering which is itself tied to a fundamental
belief in the isolatability of different aspects of human experience. This
assumption, that different aspects of our experiences can be systematic-
ally isolated and analyzed, has been extensively explored by the philo-
sopher Alfred North Whitehead in his articulation of a processual and
organismic view of reality.
In his critique of the modernist world view, Whitehead (1985, but first
written in 1926) demonstrated incontrovertibly that Newton’s first law
of motion contained a fundamental assumption which is central to any
form of modem theorizing:

’I mean the concept of an ideally isolated system. This concept embodies a

fundamental character of things, without which science, or indeed any know-
ledge on the part of finite intellects would be impossible.’ (Whitehead 1985:
58, my emphasis)

It is this assumption of the property of simple location in which ’things’,

’social entities’, and ’events’ are deemed to be isolatable, and hence
privileged as discrete and identifiable systems/states in space-time, that
modem science offered as an answer to the ancient Ionian question:
‘What is the world made of?’. A whole style of thirzking is thus rendered
possible because of this assumed property of ’simple location’; a style
characterized by what Whitehead called the Fallacy of Misplaced Con-
creteness in which things and entities rather than relations are privileged
as legitimate units of analysis. It is a style deeply rooted in an ontology
of being in which the ’thingness’ of things, social entities and their
properties and attributes are thereby taken as more fundamentally ’real’
and self-evident than actions, interactions and relationships; a style
which thereby emphasizes the notion of causality as that which allows
the strong linking of one discrete aspect of our experience to another.
It is a style which, finally, emphasizes that knowledge is about capturing
and accurately representing these primary aspects of both the material
and social world and of explaining social and material phenomena in
these causal terms.
Thus, a singular belief in the idea of an ideally isolated system (based
on an assumption of an ontology of being whereby reality is taken to be

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586

made up of things, entities and isolatable experiences) has propagated a

whole chain of epistemological commitments, intellectual priorities and
research rationales which include the representational theory of truth,
the emphasis on ’theory-building’ in human inquiry, a causal orienta-
tion in the understanding of material and social phenomena, and the
subsequent endless preoccupation with questions about appropriate
research methodologies. These remain the academic pillars of modernist
discourse.
To be sure, a number of attempts have been made in organization stud-
ies to ’loosen’ or ’weaken’ these strong academic priorities (for
instance, the ideas of ’loose coupling’, ’garbage can’, ’bounded ration-
ality’, ’mutual causation’, ’causal webs’ and the importance of ’mean-
ing’, ’action’ and ’interpretation’ as ways of relating apparently isolat-
able organizational phenomena to one another) to help explain more
complex phenomenal occurrences. Such reformulations, whilst a signi-
ficant first step, however, do not quite get at the heart of the logic of
organization which differentiates modernist preoccupations from post-
modem ones.
Modem ’strong’ thinking, therefore, is a style of thought which accentu-
ates a view of social reality as comprising discrete, static and hence
describable phenomena. It assumes a ’logic of insulation’ in which ’the
world is organized in terms of clear, separate fields which must not be
allowed to &dquo;infect&dquo; each other’ (Cooper and Burrell 1989: 1). Accord-
ing to this thought style, social phenomena such as ’individuals’,
’organizations’, ’cultures’ and ’societies’ are concrete and isolatable
real entities or attributes which can be systematically described and
explained and, therefore, meaningfully compared. Corresponding to this
modernist style of thinking, knowledge is privileged over the knowledg-
ing process itself and unsurprisingly viewed in similar discrete, com-
modifiable and cumulative terms. Such knowledge is thereby assumed
to be legitimate attempts to ’mirror’ (or partially mirror, in the case of
the interpretive view) ’things’, ’social entities’ and ’events’ as they are
deemed to exist ’out there’. Within philosophical debates, this epistemo-
logical orientation has come to be labelled the ’representational theory
of truth’ (Putnam 1981), ’representationalism’ (Rorty 1991) or the
’ideology of representation’ (Woolgar 1988). Such a theory of know-
ledge is only conceivable because of an entrenched modernist commit-
ment to an ontology of being.

Reification, Inversion and Forgetting in Modernist Organizational

Discourse

Modem representational thinking therefore adopts a ’strong’ posture

with regard to the ontological status of its objects of analysis. Thus,
’individuals’ and ’organizations’ are assigned privileged status over the
’individualizing’ process or the ’organizing’ process. The term ’process’
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 587

has, however, become common currency even in modernist discourse.

Nonetheless, there is a fundamental distinction to be made between
processes occurring ’within or henveen social entities (e.g., ’decision-
making’ processes in organizations, interactions between an organiza-
tion and its environment etc.) and the micro-organizing processes which
enact and re-enact these social entities into existence. Thus, when mod-
ernists talk about ’process’, they usually mean the various sta‘~eslstates
of isolatable ’events/conditions’ which lead towards an achievement or
outcome. ’Process’ in this modernist sense implies ’entities in process’
or process in entities (e.g. strategic processes in organizations) not pro-
cess in the constitution of entities. It does not refer to the precarious
and tentative ’assemblages’ of pattemings or local orchestration of rela-
tionships which generate consequent effects that appear to be observ-
able as discrete and isolatable stages/states. In other words, modernists
talk about pr-ocess in static terms. This is because, as we have seen,
they can only conceive of process in discrete, linear, static and sequen-
tial terms. Thus, the very act of theorizing ’process’ within the modern-
ist scheme of things renders the former static, abstracted and hence
irretrievably remote from our proximal experiences of organ-
izing.
Within organization studies, Cooper and Burrell ( 1989) pointed out that
Weick’s concepts of ’equivocality’ and ’enactment’ and Morgan’s
( 1986) image of organization as ’flux and transformation’, although
emphasizing the processual aspects of organizing, are nonetheless ’still
largely expressed in terms of the control (i.e. static) mode and thus lose
sight of the real nature of the &dquo;nomadic&dquo; (i.e. processual)’ (Cooper
and Burrell 1989: 1). Thus, repeated theoretical attempts to talk more
’rigorously’ about ’process’ in organization theory end up expressing
process in static terms.
One good example of this tendency is Sandelands and Drazin’s ( 1989)>
paper ’On the Language of Organization Theory’. Sandelands and
Drazin begin by noting that verbs such as ’shape’, ’detemiine ’ , ’ ’select’,
etc., although appearing to depict processes of organization, in fact refer
to achievement ’states’ because ’their grammatical form encompasses
the very outcomes they purport to explain’ (p. 457). Moreover, they
recognize that words such as ’firn1’ and ’competition’, like ’mass’ and
’force’ in classical mechanics, when used repeatedly can give the
undesirable impression of referring to established entities and therefore
‘impede progress’ (p. 458). Sandelands and Drazin therefore called for
more vigilance in the use of such words.

’Although scientific words need not refer to something observed, they must
at least refer tosomething. Behind them must stand a definite vhject or eaerrt of
some kind. Where this minimum criteria is not met, words denote non-existent
(unreal) objects or events, which by virtue of being unobserved, cannot easily
be disputed. These are words for science to avoid ... By calling attention to
these words, better theories of organization can be made.’ (Sandelands and
Drazin 1989: 458)

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588

Whilst Sandelands and Drazin are clearly concerned with how words
are used to describe organizational processes, they are only able to
conceive of the latter in terms of ’objects’ or ’events’ (since these are
the only things deemed ’real’) and to thereby view language in clear
representationalist terms. Other aspects, such as the emergent patterning
of relationships and interactions, are deprivileged and accorded a sec-
ondary status. Thus, although Sandelands and Drazin are right in noting
that achievement verbs such as ’choice’ or explanatory principles such
as ’competition’ tend to gloss over and hence mystify organizational

processes ’in a welter of misbegotten abstractions and unauthentic pro-

cesses’ (Sandelands and Drazin 1989: 458), they nevertheless mis-
takenly believe that what is more fundamentally real are discrete and
describable ’things’, ’social entities’ and ’events’. Linguistic rigour, for
them, therefore, consists in avoiding terms which do not refer to such
discrete identifiable objects or events. Paradoxically, in insisting on
such linguistic rigour, Sandelands and Drazin rule out the very possibil-
ities of thinking in ’process’ terms. Nouns referring to ’things’ are now
privileged over verbs denoting action, movement, process, so that all
attempts to talk in terms of action and process are denied legitimacy
of expression and are therefore quickly converted into achievement
states. As will be shown in a later section, this is a peculiar feature of
the grammatical structure of the English language with which Sandel-
ands and Drazin have not yet come to terms.
In Sandelands and Drazin’s scheme of things there is no room for privil-
eging the very organizational micro-practices on which they sought to
throw light. For them, organizational processes will always be epiphen-
omena of social entities such as ’individuals’ rather than primary pro-
cesses which constitute the latter. This assumption becomes evident
when they write:

’... organization develops from inteuactions of individuals much in the same

way that snowflakes or ice-crystals develop from interactions of water molec-
ules, or melodies develop from the interplay of musical notes’. (Sandelands
and Drazin 1989: 473, my emphasis)

It is clear that for Sandelands and Drazin, interactions and the interplay
of relationships are what individuals (including individual musical
notes) ’do’ or engage in, thereby implying the primacy of individual
units as a priori social categories.
Despite their insightful appreciation of the problem of language in
organization theory, Sandelands and Drazin’s uncritical commitment to
an ontology of being directs them to privilege individuals and their
actions as the legitimate focus of analysis over and above the less obvi-
ous micro-practices of individualizing as organizing actions to be ana-

lyzed in and of themselves. Sandelands and Drazin, therefore, remain

deeply rooted in a modernist representationalist style of thought despite
their recognition, following Weick (1969), that the analysis of organiz-
ing processes is central to an understanding of organization.
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 589

Sandelands and Drazin (1989) are by no means the only organizational

writers to succumb to the attractions of a modernist style of thought.
Indeed, most other attempts at analyzing organizing processes implicitly
assume the identity and unity of both ’the organization’ and/or ’the
individual’ and regard this assumption as essentially unproblematic.
However, with a postmodern critique of this ’logic of insulation’, the
notion of ’organizational processes’ takes on a different meaning.
Organizational processes do not now refer to processes in organizations.
Instead, organizational processes refer to ’assemblages of organizings’
(Cooper and Law 1995: 3) in which evolving circuits of mediating
networks of action remain in continuous contact and motion. Only a
postmodern ’weak’ (i.e., dereifying) style of thinking can deal more
effectively with the subtle and complex nature of these organizing pro-
cesses and thereby illuminate the process/structure relationship.
It is for this reason that postmodern writers find themselves questioning
the logic of language (Derrida 1976, 1981), the logic of organizing
(Spencer Brown 1969; Herbst 1976; Cooper 1986) and the logic of the
’gaze’ (Foucault 1970) and to seek alternative modes of expression
that can allow the ephemeral aspects of process to be more adequately
expressed. Modernist thinking turns verbs into nouns, process into
structure, relationships into things, presence into re-present-ation (i.e.
making the absent present) and constructs into concrete (reified) objects.
At the same time, these relationships are inverted and ’forgotten’ so as
to give cognitive priority to outcomes and effects. This is achieved
almost unintentionally and imperceptibly through the widespread dis-
cursive practices of reification, chronological reversal, and forgetting
in academic theorizing.
Woolgar (1988) offers a useful explanation of how these reification,
inversion and forgetting processes occurs in modernist scientific
research. Woolgar notes that much of what passes for scientific research
often begins with the production of documents speculating on notions
about how the world around us might be. This step is used to project
the existence of a particular object which then forms the legitimate
focus of investigation. At this stage the speculated object begins to take
on a life of its own (reification) and is increasingly perceived as being

separate and independent of our apprehension of it. Next, a reversal of

relationship occurs so that the impression is given that it is in fact the
existence of the object which first stimulated our attention towards it.
Finally, researchers become so accustomed to talking in these inverted
terms that the initial states of conceiving, reifying and inverting of the
observer/observed relationship are forgotten or strongly denied. This
process is so subtle and insidious that it often goes undetected and,
hence, leads to the impression of a pregivenness in the object of ana-
lysis. Once this point is reached, the stage is set for a modemist/repres-
entationalist view of knowledge and inquiry. Built into the modernist
mind-set is, therefore, a tendency to reify, invert and then to forget that
these processes actually take place in the course of investigative work.

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As a consequence, modernists take as self-evident the heing status of

their objects of inquiry.

Modern Organization Theorizing: A Case of ’Misplaced

Concreteness’ .

Whitehead ( 1985 ) maintains that this modemist tendency to reify, invert

and forget and to thereby view the world as being made up of a succes-
sion of discrete configurations of matter (i.e., ’individuals’, ’organiza-
tions’, etc.) is a result of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness inherent
in modem Western thought. This fallacy is best captured in Words-
worth’s Tlm Pr-elude where the poet writes of a ’false secondary power’
by which we ’multiply distinctions’ and then forget that these are of
our own making by deeming them to be things ’That we perceive and
not that which we have made’. Wordsworth, like Whitehead, was cle-
arly aware of the debilitating effects of this abstract and disembodied
style of thinking that is characteristic of modernism.
This unique ability for abstract thinking through ’multiplying distinc-
tions’ and then ’forgetting’ that these (reified) distinctions are but mere
abstractions is what underpins the classical scientific method which is still
so overwhelmingly pervasive in contemporary academic discourses. In

truth, the real world is but a ’dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless,
merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’ (Whitehead
1985: 69). The raw bruteness of the ’real’ far exceeds the limiting logical
structures of language. It is for this very same reason that the first few
lines of the ancient Chinese Tao-Te Ching reads:

’The Tao that can be named is not the Tao

The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The Named is the Mother of all things’
(trans. in Chan 1963: 139)>

What is implied here is the violence done to this emergent and ephem-
eral reality when we attempt to impose our static organizing codes onto
it. The apparent concreteness of the qualities we perceive in the social
world are in reality attributes which we impute, through language, to
that which we apprehend as a way of ordering our experiences and
organizing our understanding. Yet, all this is amazingly easily forgotten
as Whitehead noted:

’... it is unbelievable. This (modernist) conception of the universe is

quite
surely framedin terms of high abstraction, and the paradox only arises because
we have mistaken our abstractions for- concrete realities.’ (Whitehead 1985:
69, my emphasis)

Whitehead nonetheless recognized that we cannot think without abstrac-

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 591

tions. Therefore, he maintained that it is of utmost importance that we

remain vigilant in critically revising our modes of ahstractiorr.
It is precisely this vigilant thought-style which best describes the intel-
lectual strategy of postmodern writers. In this sense, Whitehead can be
regarded as a significant precursor of postmodern thought. Indeed, it
has even been suggested that Heraclitus (whose thinking substantially
influenced Whitehead) could be legitimately regarded as a ‘Postmodern
Pre-Socratic’ (Waugh 1991: 605) and that a postmodern thinking style
like that of Derrida’s can be compared to that of the ancient Chinese
philosopher Chuang Tzu (Chien 1990; Cheng 1990) as well as to Zen
Buddhism (Odin 1990: Magliolia 1990). Postmodern thinking is, there-
fore, not confined to a particular epoch. It is an enduring style of think-
ing which resists and yet complements the modem. All this again reiter-
ates the point which Lyotard (1992) made when he emphasized that:
’A work can be modem only if it is first postmodern’ so that the post-
modem is not something which comes ’after’ the modem. Instead, the
postmodern is that ’nascent unrealized potentiality’ which gives rise to
the modem. It is the implicate and precarious processual ordering which
gives rise to the explicate, static and structured order with which mod-
ernists are all too familiar.
Modernism is, therefore, better appreciated as resulting from a system-
atic ’concealment’ and ’forgetting’ of the primary nature of action, pro-
cess and relationship as the raw material of reality. As such, the post-
modem problematic is not about the macro-processes of things/social
entities nor of the micro-processes in things/social entities. Rather, it
is concerned with the becoming of things, social entities and events.
To treat ‘individuals’ and ’organizations’ as legitimate entities with
’invisible walls’ (Elias 1978: 15) and describable characteristics and to
attribute to them a metaphysical ’will’ that can ’choose’ a course of
action, is already to buy into a >.e(fied way of understanding social
phenomena. Despite the recent attempts to discredit ’postmodemism’ in
organization studies (see, for instance, Thompson 1993; Parker 1993 ), it
is clear that much of this so-called critique has not even begun to
appreciate the complex cognitive style underpinning of much of post-
modem thought. Much of what passes for scholarly debate on modern-
ism/postmodernism, particularly in organization theory, remains firmly
rooted in a modernist set of intellectual priorities.
Modernist thinking, therefore, remains dominant and thriving. The very
demands for so-called precision, definition, clarity and parsimony as well
as a linear logical exposition in theory-building which typify academic

journal requirements are fundamental cornerstones of this modernist pro-

ject. They reflect the advanced state of this technology of isolating, dis-
secting and classifying which Toffler ( 1984), in his forward to Prigogine
and Stengers’ Order Out of Chaos, observed to be the most highly
developed skill in contemporary Western thinking. It is precisely this
linear, static and fragmenting style of thinking that the process-sensitive
thinking style of postmodernism is concerned to destructure.
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The Linguistic Organization of Reality: A Postmodern Critique of

Modernist Organizational Theorizing

We have seen that for Sandelands and Drazin (1989), words and lan-
guage refer to something beyond themselves. They are assumed to per-
form an essentially representational function. It is clear that Sandelands
and Drazin display a refreshing sensitivity to the problem of language
in organizational discourse. However, their own inattention to the char-
acteristic logic of the English language prevented them from fully
appreciating the more radical significance of their own insights. Thus,
it does not occur to Sandelands and Drazin to question the plausibility
of the concept of the ‘individual’ as a legitimate social unit in organiza-
tional analysis. Having recognized and rejected the ideas of ’organiza-
tions’, ’competition’, ’environment’, etc., as reified entities, they are
unable to take the bolder step of recognizing that this insight is similarly
applicable to the concept of ’individuals’. Postmodern thinking
(following writers such as Foucault 1970, 1979; and Derrida 1976) on
the other hand, recognizes that the individuality of individuals, which
contributes to their apparent concrete and isolatable appearances, is an
effect or outcome of primary organizing (i.e. individuating) processes
of actions, interactions and recursive patterning of relationships. Such
actions are not epiphenomena of individuals. Instead, they constitute
the latter. It is, therefore, these underlying formative organizing pro-
cesses which give rise to the appearances of social phenomena. Like

organizations, individuals are also reified entities and are themselves

tentative, and precariously balanced but relatively stabilized assem-
blages of actions and interactions. Nonetheless, the widespread tend-
ency to think in isolatable and reified terms has obscured the inner
workings of these constitutive micro-organizing processes. This tend-
ency is directly traceable to the logical structuring of the English lan-
guage and it is this aspect of language which is extensively explored
by the theoretical physicist David Bohm in his discussion of the frag-
mentation of Western thought in a way that helps us to understand the
postmodern project.
Bohm (1980) begins by noting that much of our thought is fragmented
and he attributes this to the way the English language has been struc-
tured. He specifically identifies the subject-verb-object structure of sen-
tences as a significant part of the problem. This structure:

’... implies that all action arises in a separate entity, the subject, and that in
the cases described by a tentative verb, this action crosses over the space
between them to another separate entity, the object.’ (Bohm 1980: 29)

Bohm the sentence ’It is raining’ to illustrate this tendency to

uses

fragment thought. He asks ’Where is the &dquo;It&dquo; that would, according

to the sentence, be the &dquo;rainer that is doing the raining&dquo;?’ (Bohm 1980:
29). Clearly it would be more appropriate to say (as the Chinese do)
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 593

’falling rain’, and thus emphasize the verbal function. However, since
this subject-verb-object orientation is a deeply pervasive structure, it
tends to lead to a generalized style of thinking which has a tendency
to reify and accentuate the subject and object and which, therefore,
results in our dividing our experiences into discrete and isolatable entit-
ies and events in such a way as to play down the verbal function. It is
exactly this ’false secondary power’ for creating and reifying distinc-
tions which Wordsworth and Whitehead noted. Moreover, such effects
are thereby conceived to be ’essentially fixed and static in their nature’

(Bohm 1980: 29). Recognition of this important insight led Bohm to

ask if it were not possible to avoid or minimize this static, fragmented
and reifying way of thinking by accentuating the verbal function, since
it is the verb which gives priority to actions and movements ’which
flow into each other and merge, without sharp separations or breaks’
(Bohm 1980: 30). Moreover, since ’movements are in general always
themselves changing, they have in them no permanent pattern or fixed
form with which separately existing entities could be identified’ (Bohm
1980: 30). Such a style of thinking would then be more in keeping
with a world view in which the micro-organizing processes of actions,
interactions, emergence and unfoldment are viewed as the ’real’ focal
elements of organizational analyses. Apparently static and discrete
social entities and phenomena are thereby held to be secondary and
relatively invariant states of this underlying flux and trans-
formation.
Bohm was not the only one to observe this fragmenting and reifying
tendency in the English language. The poet Ernesto Fenollosa (in Pound
1969), writing at the turn of this century, came to a similar conclusion in
his comparative study of poetry and the Chinese language. Like Bohm,
Fenollosa noted that the characteristic process of Western logical
abstraction is one in which long lists of nouns and adjectives are formed
since these are the privileged natural names of classes of ’entities’ and
’attributes’. What gets left out in this process is attention to the verbal
function. As a consequence, verbs become transformed into participles
and gerunds so that ’to run’, for example, becomes a case of ’running’.
Action verbs are transformed into what Sandelands and Drazin (1989)>
identified as ’achievement verbs’. Thus instead of directly thinking
’man runs’, this action becomes ’the man is running’, whereby the
quasi-verb ’is’ is called into use. Like Bohm, Fenollosa recognized that
this ‘is’ (and its counterpart ’is not’) has colonized much of modem
Western thought, leaving language ’thin’ and ’cold’ because we think
more and more through it and less and less into it. Thus we do not say
that a tree ’greens itself’ but that ’the tree is green’ or that ’monkeys
bring forth live young’ but that ’the monkey is a mammal’.
Both Fenollosa and Bohm demonstrated unequivocally that the modern-
ist tendency to reify, invert and then to forget and deny the reihcation
and inversion processes is a consequence of the logical structuring of
the English language. Both emphasized the significance and importance

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of thinking in terms of a ’language of movement’. In Bohm’s case the

rheomode is recommended as a new form of language in which ‘all is
an unbroken and undivided whole movement, and that each &dquo;thing&dquo; is
abstracted only as a relatively invariant side or aspect of this movement’
(Bohm 1980: 47). For Fenollosa, on the other hand, poetry and art
provide fresh new opportunities for understanding the concreteness of
our lived experiences because they are better equipped to reveal the

ephemeral aspects of the human condition. Current postmodern preoc-

cupations such as Derrida’s deconstructive analyses and interest in the
experimental arts reflect a similar concern to reveal and to break out
of the dominant ordering codes which circumscribe modernist thought.
In this regard, postmodern thinking is not anti-empirical rather it is
ultra-empirical, dealing as it does with the concrete logic of ordering
and organizing.
When understood from this linguistic critique of modernist ontology,
organization theory can be said to be largely contaminated by abstract
categories which bear little or no relation to the proximal experiences
of the lived world, but which through time and constant usage have
become part and parcel of the legitimated language of academic discip-
lines. Inattention to the logical structuring of the English language (in
particular) and the manner in which it organizes modem organizational
discourse has led to an impoverished state of affairs in the discipline
whereby very few new insights are ever gained into the real nature of
organization. The task of postmodern organizational analysis is, there-
fore, precisely to sift through these sedimented layers of abstracted con-
cepts in order to make contact with the implicate organizational reality
beyond. The postmodern organizational analyst is perhaps better
described as a ’cryptographer’, someone who ’can at once account for
nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter
and read into the folds of the soul’ ( Deleuze 1993: 3). Adopting this
theoretical orientation requires a crucial revision in one’s cognitive
style.

Thinking Processually: Towards a Postmodern Analysis of

Organizing
Postmodern thinking thus involves a critical revision in our ontological
commitments from an ontology of heing to an ontology of hecoming.
This implies according primacy to reality as a processual, heterogen-
eous and emergent configuration of relations. It also implies that we

may not take established social categories such as ’individuals’ and

’organizations’ as already given and ’out there’. Instead, these taken-
for-granted categories need to be explored and explained. Consequently,
it means that our theoretical focus is no longer on organizational
features such as ’structures’, ’cultures’ and ’ethics’, etc. Instead, the
very idea of organization itself becomes the problematic. How does it

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 595

come to acquire its apparently concrete status? What primary organizing

process allows it to take on the semblance of an ’already constituted
entity’?. Such questions form the central problematic of a postmodern
analysis of organization.
In a recent paper which attempts to set out the operating terms for such
an emergent and processual approach to
organizational analysis, Law
(1992) defines organizing as a process of heterogeneolis engineering
in which:

‘... bits and pieces from the social, the technical, the conceptual and the tex-
tual are fitted together and so converted (or &dquo;translated&dquo;) into a set of equally
heterogeneous scientific products.’ (Law 1992: 382)
Law insists that if we want to understand social phenomena such as
organization, it is important not to start out by assuming that which we
wish to explain. Thus, we cannot begin by assuming the unproblematic
existence of social entities such as ’individuals’, ’organizations’ or
’society’. Instead, we should begin by assuming that all we have are
actions, interactions and local orchestrations of relationships. From this
we might then begin to ask how it is that some kinds of interactions

appear to ’succeed’ in stabilizing and reproducing themselves, thus gen-

erating ’effects’ such as ’individuals’ or ’organizations’, whilst others
disappear completely. For Law, this way of explaining the emergence
of social order, will reveal that apparently ’solid’ social entities such
as ‘individuals’ are in fact provisionally ordered networks of heterogen-
eous materials whose resistance to ordering has been temporarily over-
come. The function of any form of social analysis is, therefore, to

’explore and describe local processes of patterning, social orchestration,

ordering and resistance’ (Law 1992: 387) in order to chart the ongoing
struggles and contestations intrinsic to the organizing process. Law sees
this heterogeneous networking (which we usually call organizing) as
essentially a dynamic process better appreciated as ’a verb a some- -

what uncertain process of overcoming resistance rather than as the -

fait accompli of a noun’ (Law 1992: 381 ).

The decisive advantage of Law’s approach to analyzing organization
over, say, Sandelands and Drazin’s (1989) proposed way of analyzing
organizational processes, is that whilst the latter assumed the individual
actor to be a discrete autonomous entity which ’acts’, in Law’s approach
this very notion of the ‘individual actor’ is itself ’dismantled’ or
destructured and explained in more primary interactional terms.
Thus:

‘... what counts as a person is an effect generated by a network of heterogen-

eous interacting materials ... People are who they are because they are a
patterned network of heterogeneous materials.’ (Law 1992: 384, my
emphasis)
By offering this way of explaining the phenomena of individual actors
and ’their’ actions, Law is able to avoid the problem of attributing a

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596

’misplaced concreteness’ to the former, which Sandelands and Drazin

were unable to do. For Law, social ’effects’ such as ’individuals’ and
’organizations’ appear to us as unified and discrete entities because of
the deliberate concealment of the heterogeneous networkings going on.
This is the outcome of a simplifying (i.e., reifying, inverting and
forgetting) operation which Law terms ’punctualization’.
In our daily practice, we are unable to cope with the endless relational
ramifications of the heterogeneous networks which make up our lived
experiences, hence punctualization provides a means of reducing net-
work complexities in order to make them more manageable.
Hence:
‘... much of the time we are not even in a position to detect network complex-
ities if a network acts as a single block, then it disappears, to be replaced
...

by the action itself and the seemingly simple author of that action.. For
instance, for most of us most of the time a television set is a single and coher-
ent object which we take as essentially unproblematic. However, when it
breaks down, it rapidly turns into a network of electronic components and
human interventions.’ (Law 1992: 385)

Thus, the appearance of the solidity and unity of social entities such
as ’individuals’ and ’organizations’ is the result of network packagin,,
or routines which lead us to think in terms of the self-identities of sucl,
entities rather than the less obvious continuous working interaction;,
which constitute and support them. These interactions are essentially
micro-practices of oi,qaiii=iii,g in which heterogeneous materials are
’borrowed, bent, displaced, rebuilt, reshaped, stolen, profited from and/
or misrepresented to generate the effects of agency, organization and

power’ (Law 1992: 387). Such micro-organizing strategies contribute to

the appearance of unity, identity and permanence of social phenomena.
However, once we recognize, through a postmodern style of thought,
that these unitary and fixed appearances are already effects of organiza-
tional micro-practices involving processes such as punctualization (and
others that Law discusses), we also begin to realize that a postmodem
organizational analysis must take as its central problematic the analysis
of such organizational micro-processes.
Law’s processual and emergent approach to organizational analysis is
‘postmodern’ in the sense we have been using throughout this paper.
It is an attempt to eschew the use of traditionally convenient organiza-
tional concepts and terminology which may serve as handy ’explanatory
principles’ (Bateson 1972: 38) but which essentially operate to conceal
the precarious and contested nature of the underlying organizing process
itself. Law’s approach also reveals that the act of organizing is an emer-
gent and precarious ontological act of bringing forth an ordered world.
As such, the legitimate focus for a postmodern organizational analysis
is not the features or characteristics of ’organizations’ but rather the
micro-practices and micro-logics of organizing which are realized
through local orchestrations of actions, interactions and interlocking
patterns of relationships.

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 597

Postmodern Organizational Analysis: Ontological Commitments,

Intellectual Priorities and Theoretical Preoccupations
What assumptions underpin a postmodern style of thinking in organiza-
tional analysis? What does an organizational analysis based on becom-
ing (rather than being) entail? What are the appropriate theoretical foci
for a postmodern analysis of organization? These are some of the ques-
tions that will be addressed in this section.

Ontological and Epistemological Commitments

It should by now be clear to the reader that a postmodem style of thinking
is one which eschews thinking in terms of accomplishments, of ‘nouns’,
’end states’, insulated, discrete ‘social entities’ and ’events’. Instead, it is
a style which privileges action, movement, process and emergence. It is
also a style which is at home with paradox, uncertainty and the not-yet-
known. Postmodern thinking involves a radical questioning of the spe-
cialized categories of knowledge which inhabit academic disciplines such
as organization studies by attempting to think ’outside’ these established

disciplines. In so doing it enables us to see that these theories of organiza-

tion (as institutionalized forms of thought) are always already themselves
effects of formal organizing processes.
For postmodern organization theorists, therefore, ’organization’ itself is
a question and not yet a given. In this regard, Foucault’s ( 1986) tech-

nique of ’problematization’ and Derrida’ss (1981) ’deconstruction’,

when applied to organizational analysis, turn the given into a question
and the familiar into the unfamiliar in order to challenge the modernist
cognitive stance that takes things for granted. Postmodern thinking,
therefore, is not so much concerned with the ’facts’ of organization as
fait accompli states. Neither is it concerned with the organization of
work (as is mainstream organization theory). Rather it is more con-
cemed with the logic and organization of thought. As such, it directs
us to closely examine the micro-practices of division, spacing, framing,
hierarchies of arrangements, edge and margins, sectioning, etc., which
collectively as local assemblages of organizings produce the phenomena
of organization. These micro-practices are physical inscriptions or prim-
ary markings by which we punctuate our experiences and through which
we come to order our lifeworld and thereby to know ourselves. These
are what Law (1992) refers to as ’punctualizations’ and what Cooper

(1989) calls ’writing’. For Cooper, writing in its most generalized sense
is ’the process by which human agents inscribe organization and order
on their environment’ (p. 484). It is a technology developed as a con-

sequence of the ’taxonomic urge’ to fix the flux and flow of the world
in temporal and spatial terms and is concerned fundamentally with the
structure and organization of representations. Writing in this funda-
mental sense is central to administrative functions involving classifying,
listing, formulating, routinizing, prescribing, etc. These are the basic
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598

organizing micro-practices with which a postmodern science of organ-

ization is mainly concerned.
A becoming style of thinking in organizational analysis strives to faith-
fully chart out the precarious, emergent assemblages of organizings with
an eye towards processes of exclusion, negation and suppression which

collectively contribute to the accomplishment of organization. It is to

identify the accidents, the minute deviations or conversely, the com- -

plete reversals the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calcula-
-

tions that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have
value for us’ (Foucault, in Rabinow 1984: 81). Organization treated
in this way as an ’accomplishment’ is the product of heterogeneous
engineering involving the coming together of inscriptional acts and
interactions to form a coherent unity. A number of recent writers
(Callon 1980; Latour 1987; Cooper 1990, 1992; Law 1992, 1994;
Cooper and Law 1995) have begun to apply this style of thinking to
organizational analysis and to elaborate their implications for a post-
modem science of organization.

Intellectual Priorities

Adherence to a postmodern style of thought requires considerable revi-

sion of intellectual priorities. Cooper and Law (1995) and Law (1994)
recommend a path of sociological modesty to which an analytical prin-
ciple of symmetry is vigilantly adhered. The principle of analytical sym-
metry implies that we need to constantly bear in mind that the distinc-
tions in the human world are not naturally given; they are always
ah.ea4v> products or effects of prior organizing processes.
’To insist on symmetry is to assert that ever.vthing deserves explanation ...
that everything you seek to explain or describe should be approached in the
same way.... you don’t want to start any investigation by privileging anything
or anyone. And, in particular, you don’t want to start by assuming that there
are certain classes of phenomena that don’t need to be explained at all.’ (Law
1994: 10)

To talk of symmetry is to imply that there is no a priori ordering or

distinction that we should take as unquestionable. It is also to say that
there are no natural hierarchies in the order of things and that opposi-
tions such as before/after, inside/outside, simple/complex, macro/micro
no longer pre-exist analysis. Moreover, ’instead of unambiguous differ-
ence there is equivalence, equivocality, uncertainty’ (Cooper and Law
1995: 4). Symmetry is therefore another way of expressing commitment
to a becoming style of thought.
Distinctions which are claimed to reside in the nature of things must
be unpicked in a symmetrical manner. Why, for instance, do we assume
a pr-iori a distinction between human actors on the one hand and tech-

nical objects on the other? Law asks:

’Why are we so convinced that these distinctions are given in the nature of

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 599

things’? What happens if we treat them, instead, as an effect, a product of

ordering? If we do this then we can start to explore how it is that machines

come to be machines.’ (Law 1994: 1 1 )

Asking how these distinctions come to be made will then reveal the
assumptions that are frequently made about the notion of human
agency. As Foucault (1979) convincingly demonstrated, agency is not
given in nature but is an ’effect’ of primary organizing processes
applied to the human body. For Foucault, the main object of organiza-
tion is the objectification of the human subject through a range of organ-
izational micro-practices in order to make the subject’s body more man-
ageable for administrative purposes. Individual agents, therefore, are
always already objectified by these prior organizing processes which
have been obscured and forgotten as a consequence of the dominance
of modernist discourse.
To operate according to a principle of symmetry is to begin from the
rawness of an action as a ’happening’:

’In its most callow sense, an action is a happening; before anything else -

before meaning, significance, before it’s fitted into any schema - it sinTply
happens. As happening, action precedes all thought, all ordering and organiza-
tion.’ (Cooper and Law 1995: 4)

The happening is a pure symmetrical experience which is not yet deter-

mined and whose indeterminacy therefore ’provokes a state of tension,
of agitation’ (Cooper and Law 1995: 5) since some act of organizing
needs to be applied to it in order to (temporarily) remove the state of
tension and uncertainty and to alleviate the state of agitation. Starting
from this raw, pre-ordered happening, therefore, allows us better to
approach the phenomena of organization symmetrically.
The principle of symmetry is therefore an attempt to deprivilege domin-
ant categories and challenge entrenched distinctions by asking how they
got to be what they are. It is an attempt to shift the theoretical focus
away from organizational effects to a concern with underlying actions,
relations and processes since everything for the postmodern thinker is
an effect (Callon 1980: Latour 1987). It is for this reason that postmod-
em organizational writers such as Cooper (1992) direct their attention
to the organizational micro-practices which work to create order out of
chaos and organization out of disorganization. Postmodern organiza-
tional analysis is, therefore, concerned with local patterns of orchestra-
tion in which the affairs of the world are made more pliable, wieldable
and hence more amenable to human intervention and control. This shift
in theoretical focus is what distinguishes postmodern from modem
organizational analysis.

Theoretical Preoccupations
Postmodern thinking, as we have seen, is not so much concerned with
the content or facts of organization as it is with the structure and logic

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of organizing. Organizing the

structuring of space and time through
as
division, ordering, listing, framing, etc., provides the theoretical focus
for a postmodern organizational analysis. In this regard, a railway time-
table, an obvious and everyday item, tells us more about railway organ-
ization than do the company’s organizational charts or indeed the trains
themselves. Likewise, the examination system in the university, how it
is carried out, the examination protocols and processes of marking, etc.,
tell us more about the aims of the university than explicitly stated aims
such as the ’pursuit of truth’. In other words, the assemblages of organ-
izings which make up what we call ‘an organization’ contain patterns
of relationships which are recursively intimated in the larger
totality.
A detailed local examination of organizational micro-practices lead us
to recognize how aspects of the wider world are recursively intimated
in what is immediate and at hand. It is for this reason that Law’s ( 1986>
study of the evolution of methods of long distance control in the Portu-
guese East India Company, Latour’s (1988) discussion of the translation
and displacement processes involved in the search for a cure for the
anthrax disease afflicting the French cattle industry in the 1880s, and
Cooper’s (1992) detailed study of the organizational micro-practices of
remote control, displacement and abbreviation, all demonstrate how in
real ‘concrete’ and empirical terms these ‘assemblages of organizings’
enable the remote, obdurate and intractable features of the world to be
rendered more accessible, pliable and wieldable and hence more amen-
able to human intervention.

Conclusion

Modem and postmodern styles of thought derive from distinctly differ-

ent ontological commitments. Modernist organizational theorizing treats
as essentially unproblematic the unity and identity of social categories
such as individuals and organizations. This is primarily due to a tend-
ency to reify objects of analysis, and then to give them ontological
priority and status in the research process. The tendency to attribute a
’false concreteness’ to objects of analysis is traceable to the logical
structuring of language which organizes our thought processes so that
our experiences are describable only in discrete, static and linear terms.

Action, movement and emergence are, therefore, deprivileged in favour

of static end states, entities and events. Such a cognitive predisposition
therefore works to overlook the significance of local organizational
micro-practices involving such basic processes as division, spacing and
framing, which as emergent assemblages of organizational actions con-
tribute to the accomplishment of organization. Modem organizational
theorizing is, therefore, retrospective in that it assumes organization to
be an accomplished phenomenon. Even when it tries to theorize ’pro-
cess’ it treats the latter as an already determined ‘state’. For modem

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 601

organizational theorists, therefore, actions, relationships and process are

epiphenomena of primary social entities. Individuals and organizations
’act’ or ’relate’ to one another. As such, modernist intellectual priorities
and theoretical preoccupations are entirely at odds with postmodern
concerns.
Postmodern thinking, on the other hand, is the attempt to think about the
emergence of organization. Its commitment to an ontology of becoming
implies that it treats actions, relationships and processes as primary
and therefore more ’real’ than social entities such as ’individuals’ or
’organizations’. These effects or products are now themselves viewed
asepiphenomena of implicit assemblages of organizational actions and
interactions. As a consequence, postmodern organizational analysis
takes a step backwards to examine and reveal the precarious local
orchestration of material, technical and social relationships which give
rise to relatively stabilized configurations that we then assume to be
discrete social entities and/or events. Clearly, modem and postmodern
styles of thought express themselves through vastly different ontolo-
gical commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccupa-
tions. Yet the modem is none other than a momentary lapsing into
forgetfulness of its necessarily postmodern origin. A postmodern organ-
izational analysis seeks, therefore, to elaborate the ’initial forgetting’
brought about by the ’modemist turn’.

Note * The author would like to thank Robert

Cooper and three anonymous reviewers for
their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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