Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational

Analysis: An Introduction
Robert Cooper, Gibson Burrell

Abstract

Robert Cooper, The paper introduces the current debate in the human sciences between the opposing
Gibson Burrell conceptual positions of ’modernism’ and ’postmodernism’ and discusses its implications
Department of for organizational analysis. The debate focusses on the nature of ’discourse’
Behaviour in
(information, knowledge, communication) and its role in social systems. The discourse
Organizations, of modernism rests on transcendent yet anthropocentric criteria such as ’progress’ and
University of ’reason’ which are varyingly exemplified in the work of Bell, Luhmann and Habermas.
Lancaster,
U.K.
In contrast, postmodern discourse (represented here mainly by the work of Lyotard,
Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari) analyzes social life in terms of paradox and
indeterminacy, thus rejecting the human agent as the centre of rational control and
understanding. The paper then considers two contrasting views of the organizing
process which follow from these opposing approaches to discourse. In the modernist
model, organization is viewed as a social tool and an extension of human rationality. In
the postmodern view, organization is less the expression of planned thought and
calculative action and a more defensive reaction to forces intrinsic to the social body
which constantly threaten the stability of organized life. The implications of the latter
view for orthodox organizational analysis are discussed in some detail.

Preamble

This paper is the first in a series for Organization Studies in which we attempt to
outline some of the key concepts and methodological insights which a number
of European social theorists have developed in recent years and which are of
direct relevance to organizational analysis. The work of these thinkers is seen
here as being inextricably tied up in a major ongoing debate concerning what
have been called Modernism and Postmodernism. In this first, long article we
have attempted to do justice to many of the issues raised in the course of this
debate pointing to the battle positions which have been drawn up on both sides.
The language used in this introductory paper may prove to be out of the
ordinary for many readers of the journal. This is because we have tried to be
true to the positions of those involved and also to respect their phraseology,
91
conceptualizations and forms of expression. In doing this, we are conscious of
the space we have taken up and do not make this claim upon the reader’s time
lightly. We have struggled to provide an introductory piece which is neither

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inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the modernism-postmodernism debate

nor so naive and oversimplistic as to disgust those readers who do have a degree

of familiarity with the issues at contention. The penalty we have paid for aiming
at this intermediate position is length. The present paper provides an overview
of the debate and makes passing reference to the work of Modernists such as
Bell, Luhmann and Habermas. We also speak here of Nietzsche, Derrida,
Lyotard and Foucault to all of whom the epithet ’postmodernism’ has been
attached. In our second article, we will turn to the work of Michel Foucault and
discuss his direct relevance to the world of organizational analysis. Following
this, in later issues of Organization Studies, the work of Derrida, Habermas
and Luhmann will be subjected to precisely the same critical investigation. This
present paper then has to be seen as pointing the way into what may be, for
some, a new area of intellectual endeavour and confrontation. It is to be
followed up by more detailed, substantive considerations of individual social
theorists whose work is relevant to organization studies and who are important
figures in the modernist-postmodernist confrontation.

.;&dquo;.-’
Introduction ~ ..~ &dquo;

The human sciences are currently undergoing one of their periodic bouts of
self-analysis and self doubt in which certain traditionally prized shibboleths of
liberal academic discourse such as ’reason’ and ’progress’ have come under the
microscope of a renewed critical reflection. The debate is polarized around two
apparently conflicting epistemological positions: modernism with its belief in
the essential capacity of humanity to perfect itself through the power of rational
thought and postmodernism with its critical questioning, and often outright
rejection, of the ethnocentric rationalism championed by modernism. Apart
from the radical revaluation of the whole process of modernization which this
dialogue evokes, there are significant implications for how we understand the
role and nature of organizations in the modern world. Not least of these is the
shift away from the prevailing definition of organization as a circumscribed
administrative-economic function (‘the organization’) to its formative role in
the production of systems of rationality. This is clearly a return to the grand
concerns that Weber introduced into the study of modern social systems, in

which bureaucratic organization had created the ’iron cage’ of the modern
economic order and whose other significant effect had been to purge the world
of the auratic and magical. In other words, Weber made us see modern
organization as a process which emblemized the rationalization and objectifica-
tion of social life, and it is to this process that the current debate returns us, but
with a fresh twist which directs our attention to the concept of discourse and its
place in institutional structures.
Weber’s work holds a significance that has been generally submerged in
contemporary organizational analysis: the object of his analysis was modern
bureaucratic organization as a process in the continuing mastery of the social

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and physical environment rather than organizations per se. Rational

organization is a response to forces that we cannot really understand and it is as
much a progression of ’errors’ as it is of rationality (Smart 1983). In fact,
rationality in Weber’s analyses shades into ’rationalization’, a form of
discourse in which logically consistent or ethically acceptable reasons are
presented for ideas and actions whose true motives are not perceived.
Rationality thus becomes a concealment of its own inner workings. Since it is
partly grounded in the ’unknown’ or the unconscious, it also appears to have a
life of its own, an automaticity that is beyond direct human control. All this was
part of Weber’s project in analyzing the development of modern bureaucratic
organization.
In contrast, the object of contemporary modes of organizational analysis is the
organization as a discrete system which subordinates bureaucratic logic to its
own hypostatized needs. What is privileged here is the idea of organization as a

quasi-stable collection of things or properties, whereas for Weber the very

concept of organization was placed in question as an uneasy fabrication. What
defines this concept of organization is its prior and implicit self-classification as
a formal system of work; its capacity to ’produce the goods’ precludes any other

possible conception (see, e.g. Hall 1972; Perrow 1972). This mode of
organization thus emerges as a product of ’spontaneous sociology’ in which we
merely see reflected the images that the organization tends to offer of its own
functioning and functions (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).
This historical displacement in the nature of the object of organizational
analysis adduces the tasks of the present paper: the identification and analysis
of two general forms of organization - the one, automatic and autonomous in
operation, defying logical closure; the other, calculative and utilitarian in
intent, reassuring in its substance within the wider context of the discourses
-

of modernism and postmodernism, with special reference to the implications of

this contextualization for the social science of organizations.
A similar distinction is drawn by Varela (1979) in his analysis of the two major
forms of knowledge used in the study of natural and social systems. Varela’s
work is significant in the present context because it directly relates forms of
discourse to the cybernetic concept of organization (Morgan 1986). Varela
distinguishes two basic themes of organization: autonomy and control. The two
themes entail two different discourses of information/knowledge. In the
autonomous approach, information is ’always relative to the process of
interactions of the domain in which they occur, and to the observer-community
that describes them’ (Varela 1979: 267). Consequently, autonomous informa-
tion is a process of interaction between terms which specify each other and,
since therefore it cannot be located in any one particular term, it denies the
tendency to see the world in terms of simple substances or things. In contrast,
information in the control sense is referential (mapping one set of terms onto a
corresponding set), it restricts the point of view to fixed interactions and
observational positions, it is ’instructive’ (i.e., it tells us how to act in regard to a
particular goal), and does not explicitly include the observer, an elision which

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runs the risk of denying the active role the observer plays in the construction
and maintenance of information/knowledge systems.
The discourse of modernism can be said to be referential in the sense that it sees
language as a means of expressing something other than itself. More
specifically, it is a metadiscourse which legitimates itself by reference to ’some
grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of
meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation
of wealth’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiii). It posits the idea of a criterion which already
exists, an already-made-up mind - often of extra-historical and universalistic
content -
which necessarily implies an already existing answer to questions. It
puts the answer before the question and in this sense may be said to be
’instructive’. In the sense that it ’already knows’, modernism is totalizing and
controlling. I ..- ~
’....
-

>

Postmodern discourse begins with the idea that systems have lives of their own
which make them fundamentally independent of human control. Systems
express only themselves and we may understand them only through analysis of
their own self-referential workings. For the postmodern thinker systems do not
have meanings or purposes; these are human projections in which we
uncritically assume that the world exists only for us and by which we locate
ourselves at the controlling centre of things. Since the world is basically
self-referential, it is neither pro-human nor anti-human; it just is. Postmodern-
ism therefore decentres the human agent from its self-elevated position of
narcissistic ’rationality’ and shows it to be essentially an observer-community
which constructs interpretations of the world, these interpretations having no
absolute or universal status.
z

’ ~
~

Modernism .

Modernism is that moment when man invented himself; when he no longer saw
himself as a reflection of God or Nature. Its historical source lies in the
eighteenth-century philosophy of the Enlightenment which chose Reason as
the highest of human attributes. Reason, according to Kant, is when we think
for ourselves and cease depending on an external authority to make up our
minds for us; it thus implies a critical sense in which we have both to develop
our powers of rational discrimination and have the courage to express them
when appropriate; Aude sapere, said Kant: ’dare to know’.
Also at this time the expediencies of Reason were appropriated by social
thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Comte whose concern was their application
to the increasingly weighty problems of government, administration and
planning brought about by the industrialization of society. We thus find the
rudiments of organizational thinking in the Enlightenment philosophy. But at
this historical point there occurs a schism within Reason itself, showing that it
too is subject to the displacements intrinsic to self-reference: Reason is
appropriated by an early form of systems thinking which subverts its critical

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edge to the functional demands of large systems. The followers of Saint-Simon

drew up a blueprint for the systeme de la Mediterranee, a projected ’universal
association’ of the peoples of Europe and the Orient through a comprehensive
network of railways, rivers and canals. The Suez Canal, begun in 1854 and
completed in 1869, represented part-realization of this dream. Comte, perhaps
the first philosopher of organization, saw industrial organization (the scientific
organization of labour and knowledge for the production of wealth) as the
source of human unity and progress. His was a theory of organization applied

to the administration of society as a whole, but which laid down detailed

specifications at the level of the micro-function: the precise roles of politicians,
industrialists, bankers; the optimum number of men in each city, etc. The spirit
of this functional reason was well captured at the time by Goethe in the
character of Faust who translated passive reason, mere thought, into active
reason, the accomplished deed, through the technological transformation of
the entire world (Berman 1983). Modernization thus appeared early on as the
organization of knowledge expressed in terms of the needs of large-scale
technological systems. The Victorians celebrated this achievement in the Great
Exhibition of 1851.
Modernism thus has two versions: critical modernism, a reanimation of Kant’s
programme of enlightenment, and systemic modernism, the instrumentaliza-
tion of reason envisioned by Saint-Simon and Comte.
Systemic modernism is currently seen to be the dominant form of reason, now
more usually expressed as ’instrumental rationality’. This is well brought out in

Bell’s (1974) thesis that modern (or post-industrial) society differs from
previous societies in relying on knowledge that is essentially theoretical. Bell
cites the chemical industry as the first of the truly modern industries because its
origin lies in the intimate linkage between science and technology: it is
necessary to have a theoretical knowledge of the macro molecules being
manipulated in order to create chemical synthesis (the recombination and
transformation of compounds). Bell’s vision of how theoretical knowledge is
used in the post-industrial era reveals its technocratic and systemic character.
’Post-industrial society is organized around knowledge for the purpose of social
control and the directing of innovation and change ...’ (Bell 1974: 20). The
point is further elaborated in the argument that theoretical knowledge offers a
’methodological promise’ for the management of the complex, large-scale
systems which distinguish the modern world. The major social, economic and
political questions of the post-industrial era centre around the problem of
’organized complexity’: large-scale systems with many interacting variables,
’which have to be co-ordinated to achieve specific goals’. The new intellectual
technologies now available for this endeavour are: information theory,
cybernetics, decision theory, game theory, utility theory, etc. The distinctive
function of this technical armoury is the definition of rational action and the
identification of the means for achieving it. Problems are formally defined in
terms of certainty/uncertainty, of constraints and contrasting alternatives.

’Certainty exists when the constraints are fixed and known. Risk means that a

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96

set of possible outcomes is known and the probabilities for each outcome can
be stated. Uncertainty is the case when the set of possible outcomes can be
stipulated, but the probabilities are completely unknown’ (Bell 1974: 30). In
this context, rationality is that action which can yield the preferred outcome,
given several competing alternatives.
Bell indicates the urge to determinacy and firm foundation in systemic
modernism in the suggestion that social ’progress’ is motivated by the human
quest for a ’common tongue and a unity of knowledge, for a set of &dquo;first
principles&dquo; which, in the epistemology of learning, would underlie the modes
of experience and the categories of reason and so shape a set of invariant truths’
(Bell 1974: 265). This leads to an increase in the scale of institutions which,

among other things, creates a vast interlocking network of relationships, more

and more thickly integrated through the ’revolutions in communication and
transportation’ the spread of cities, the growth of organizations, etc. The
-

major social revolution brought about by modernism is the attempt to control

’scale’ by new knowledge technologies such as real-time computer information
and new kinds of quantitative and qualitative programming.
&dquo;

..

Added to the concept of the large-scale unitary system is the concept of

’performance’. In Bell’s view, it is performance rather than size that
>’
distinguishes post-industrial systems. The definitive feature of performance is
what Bell calls the ’economizing mode’, most clearly seen in the idea of
.

productivity: ’the ability to gain a more than proportional output from a given
,
expenditure of capital, or a given exertion of labour, or more simply, society
could now get more with less effort or less cost’ (Bell 1974: 274). The
significance of the modern corporation lies precisely in its invention of the idea
of performance, especially in its economizing mode, and then creating a reality
.
out of the idea by ordering social relations according to the model of functional

rationality. Thus corporations, as the dominant social subsystems, become the

paradigmatic organizations of systemic modernism. This conception of
.. ,
organization has been identified as an exigency of modern social systems by the
German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s work represents a
formalization as well as a justification of the developments charted by Bell. In
what is sometimes called the ’new systems theory’, Luhmann spells out the
» I inexorable rationality of systemic modernism in which Kant’s notion of the
critically rational subject is completely repressed in the interests of a
machine-like system of social functionality. Society itself becomes a gigantic
..

organization: ’The true goal of the system, the reason it programmes itself like
a computer, is the optimization of the global relationship between input and

output- in other words, performativity’ (Lyotard 1984:11 ). Now performativ-

ity in systemic modernism assumes a more fundamental function than the
~ performance criterion noted by Bell; it becomes a generalized capacity to
’produce the goods’ effectively and hence it is also a principle of realization and
objectification. It therefore takes precedence over thought itself in the social
mind. Luhmann recognizes this point when he says that in post-industrial
societies the normativity of laws is superseded by the legitimation of

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 97

performativity. More specifically, the source of legitimation becomes the

system’s capacity to control its context (a form of contingency theory) by
reducing the complexity external and internal to it; individual aspirations must
therefore take a subordinate role. In fact, Luhmann argues that the system
must make individual actions compatible with its own overall goals through a

process of ‘disturbance-free apprenticeship’. ’Administrative procedures

should make individuals &dquo;want&dquo; what the system needs in order to perform
well’ (Lyotard 1984: 62). We have come a long way since Saint-Simon and
Comte, and Kant has been thoroughly expunged.
Critical modernism stands opposed to the cybernetic-like monolithism of
systemic modernism. Its chief exponent in contemporary social science is
Jfrgen Habermas whose project has been to reclaim the spirit of enlightened
rationalism for late modernism. Again, discourse is the object of analysis. For
Habermas, language is the medium of reason: ’All ordinary language allows
reflexive allusions to what has remained unstated’ (Habermas 1972: 168). This
sets ordinary language, with its origins in the spontaneous activities of the
common life-world, against the instrumental-calculative language of organized

systems. Hidden but still active in ordinary language is a ’natural’ kind of

reason which speaks to us with the instinctive wisdom of an ancient oracle, thus

guiding our communal works. The contemporary fate of this ’communicative

rationality’ has been its repression by the discourse of systemic modernism. For
Habermas, the discourse of the ordinary life-world is the basis of his critical
modernism and it is through the ’language of the community’ that we may
refind that lost sense of enlightenment which Kant first revealed to us. More-
over, the need for such critical reason is now more urgent than ever precisely
because of the colonization of the life-world by systemic reason. Kantian
reason takes on an added significance; it is no longer a measure of human

’maturity’ but has become a sine qua non for emancipating individuals from the
totalizing control of systemic logic.
Despite the difference between the systemic and critical forms of modernism-
the one bent on the mechanization of social order; the other, on the liberation
of the life-world they share the belief in an intrinsically logical and
-

meaningful world constituted by Reason or the universal firm foundation. This

takes two forms: (1) that discourse mirrors the reason and order already ’out
there’ in the world, and (2) that there is a thinking agent, a subject, which can
make itself conscious of this external order. In the case of systemic modernism,
the rational subject is the system itself which works according to the cybernetic
discourse of ’control and communication in the animal and the machine’
(Wiener 1948); this discourse has its own laws which can be discovered through
the application of scientific and mathematical techniques. In this context,
reason is a privileged property of the system as distinct from its parts. For critical
modernism, the thinking subject is the human individual or, more precisely, a
network of interacting individuals who, through the commonsense of ordinary
discourse, can reach a ‘universal consensus’ of human experience. There is thus
a presupposition of unity which legitimates (i.e., provides an authoritative

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98

’logic’) to the critical position, so that what is critiqued are the forces that
fragment the ideal of this unity or prevent its emergence as a possibility. It is
such legitimating meta-positions to which postmodernism objects.

Postmodernism ,
_
_
.

’ .: .

The key to understanding the discourse of postmodernism is the concept of

difference: a form of self-reference in which terms contain their own opposites
and thus refuse any singular grasp of their meanings, e.g., the paradox of the
’global village’ in which the enlargement of the world through modern
communication techniques actually makes it smaller. Difference is thus a unity
which is at the same time divided from itself, and, since it is that which actually
constitutes human discourse (Derrida 1973), it is intrinsic to all social forms. At
the very centre of discourse, therefore, the human agent is faced with a
condition of irreducible indeterminacy and it is this endless and unstoppable
demurrage which postmodern thought explicitly recognizes and places in the
vanguard of its endeavours. In this context, Lyotard has defined postmodern
discourse as ’the search for instabilities’ (Lyotard 1984: 53). Lyotard notes that
modern science is based on indeterminacy: quantum theory and microphysics
demand a redefinition of our ideas of determinate, predictable systems because
their data reveal the world as a network of self-referential structures, e.g., it is
found that far from uncertainty decreasing with more precise knowledge (i.e.,
greater control), the reverse is the case: uncertainty increases with preci-
sion.
Lyotard elaborates an argument of considerable seductive power which is
mounted against the ’grand narratives’ that legitimate the two major positions
of modernism. Their drive towards determinacy in the systems case, -

expressed as the mechanical harmony of interacting functional actors; in the

critical case, as the agreement of men in bondage to emancipate themselves-
is also a drive towards consensus. But we have seen that modern science poses a
dialectic of difference and self-reference whose logic must thwart convergence.
Lyotard argues that this also applies to consensus the more one reaches for -

it, the farther away it seems to be: ’Consensus is a horizon that is never reached’
(Lyotard 1984: 61). Instead of consensus being the power house of social
action, it is dissensus which continually compels our attention.
In another text, Lyotard (Lyotard and Th6baud 1968) analyzes some of the less
obvious aspects of this typically postmodern approach to discourse via the
concept of the ‘game’. He had already viewed social action as a ‘language game’
in which the participating actors made various ’moves’ according to recognized
. rules (Lyotard 1984). This time he extends the idea of a language game to
include the idea of ’agonistics’ or contest and it is this which gives ’drive’ to
social life. As soon as the element of struggle goes out of the game, it loses its
power to motivate human action. Thus mastery and domination obtain their
vitality not from the complete annihilation of one player by the other but

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through maintaining a state of continuous difference and provocation. The

triumph of consensus is thus similar to the destruction of opposition, for it
negates the very thing, dissensus, on which it rests. In an afterword to Lyotard,
Samuel Weber interprets the dissensus of the game as a ’tension between unity
and disunity’ (Lyotard and Th6baud 1986: 113) and thus gives to difference and
self-reference the function of an originary and irreducible force which pervades
all social encounters as raw ’feelings of envy, jealousy, and rancour’ (Lyotard
and Th6baud 1986: 106). Difference is thus more than a theoretical concept
since it takes on the force of elemental passion, a kind of prime energizer.
Human action is thus seen to stem from drives beyond direct human control;
behaviour, individual or institutional, is essentially a reaction to an originary
force. The idea that we are controlled by forces that lie beyond us is
fundamentally repugnant to modern rational thought which has constructed,
over the centuries, a discourse more or less deliberately aimed at
denying this
possibility. We now know that organizational society set out to tame man’s
impulsive passions by attenuating them into social and economic ’interests’
(Hirschman 1977). Passions as ’determining movements whose composition
organized social life were forgotten by the productivist economy of the
...

nineteenth century, or rejected into the sphere of literature. The study of

passions thus became a literary specialization in the nineteenth century; it no
longer belonged to political philosophy or economy’ (Certeau 1986: 25).
We have to turn to Nietzsche (perhaps the major influence on postmodern
thought) to understand what underlies this particular insight into the nature of
modernist rationality. For Nietzsche, the force of difference is the active, that
which possesses power of self-transformation, i.e., self-reference; opposing it
is the reactive, a form of action which is at once inferior to and dependent on the
active. These opposed forces, the active and the reactive, constitute the basis of
Nietzsche’s concept of ’genealogy’: ’the art of difference or distinction’
(Deleuze 1983: 56). Genealogy is Nietzsche’s way of showing how the superior
force of the active becomes inverted in the inferior force of the reactive. The
reactive denies its origin in the active: ’... it is characteristic of reactive forces
to deny. from the start, the difference which constitutes them at the start, to
invert the differential element from which they derive and to give a deformed
image of it’ (Deleuze 1983: 56). In this way, the reactive reduces all knowledge
and discourse to mere representation, to ’talking about’, and. ultimately,
negation. In the sciences of man especially we see that passive, reactive and
negative concepts are everywhere dominant: ’utility’, ’adaptation’, and
’regulation’ serve as the major explanatory motifs.
The work of another postmodern thinker, Jacques Derrida, extends
Nietzsche’s analysis of differential forces but turns it in an unexpected
direction. Starting from the position that meaning and understanding are not
naturally intrinsic to the world and that they have to be constructed, Derrida
develops a deconstresctive method which, in reversing the process of
construction, shows precisely how artificial are the ordinary, taken-for-granted
structures of our social world. Derrida’s purpose is to show that rationality and

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rationalization are really processes that seek to hide the contradictions at the
heart of human existence. What motivates the call to organize is the
recognition of a discursive ’gap’ which organization serves to cover up.
Derrida’s analysis is focussed on the processual, as opposed to structural,
character of human institutions. He wants to show that the world of
commonsense structures is the active product of a process that continually

privileges unity, identity, and immediacy over the differential properties of

absence and separation; in this active privileging there emerges the element of
contestation in which the logic of unity and identity is pitted against the forces
of difference and undecidability. Modernist reason now becomes more like
Lyotard’s conception of a contest in which reason is aligned against unreason,
truth against error, etc.
Nietzsche’s genealogical method leads to another feature of postmodernism:
the idea that knowledge is the result of a force that compels us to render the
world thinkable, i.e., determinate. As we have seen, the world is not already
there, waiting for us to reflect it. It is the result of a complex process of a will to
know which orders and organizes the world because it cannot tolerate not
knowing; contradiction and ambivalence are forms of abnormality which have
to be exorcised. What Luhmann identifies as the need of modern systems to run
smoothly is seen in postmodernism as a gigantic social version of the ’haste of
wanting to know’. What modernism considers ’rational’, postmodernism sees
as the attempt to canonize the discourse of the normal over the abnormal.

Rorty (1980) captures the spirit of these conflicting interpretations in his

distinction between ’systematic’ and ’edifying’ discourses. The former serves to
justify and ground everyday actions and beliefs by making them seem logical,
even natural; it provides an order of reassurance. ’Edifying’ discourse helps us
’break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes’ (Rorty 1980: 12); it seeks
to auraticize (i.e., eroticize) discourse and knowledge, to show the
extraordinary within the ordinary, the active within the reactive.
Now for Nietzsche the forces surrounding the active-reactive opposition are
focussed on the body biological, social or political
-

and it is the
-

materiality of the body, the lived social organism in its physical expression, that
provides the perpetuum mobile of social life. The body is self-referential in the
sense that every social action originates in it and returns to it: ’... the animal

body is the great central ground underlying all symbolic reference ... Every
statement about the geometrical relationships of physical bodies in the world is
ultimately referable to certain definite human bodies as origins of reference’
(Whitehead 1929: 198). The immanence of the body in social life, universally
neglected by social scientists, is taken up as a pervasive critical theme by
postmodern thinkers and its institutional and organizational implications
worked through perhaps the most thoroughly by Michel Foucault (e.g.,
Foucault 1980). For Foucault, the body is the locus of the auratic and not
merely a physiological structure; it is the place of passion, will, ’desires, failings
and errors ... and a volume in perpetual disintegration’ (Foucault 1977a: 148)
-
in short, the body is the organ of difference.

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In Foucault’s work, the auratic dimension appears as a form of ’estrangement’

in which the normal and familiar come to be seen in a novel and sometimes
disturbing way. In order to see the ordinary with a fresh vision, we have to
make it ’extraordinary’, i.e., to break the habits of organized routine and see
the world ’as though for the first time’; it is necessary to free ourselves of
normalized ways of thinking which blind us to the strangeness of the familiar.
Hence Foucault’s use of provocative images and tropes to stop the reader’s
understanding in its tracks: the hypothesis that the idea of man is a modern
invention, scarcely two centuries old; the grotesque description of Damiens,
the regicide, whose body was publicly tortured, fleeced and dismembered as a
symbol of penal repression (i.e., legalized violence) in the eighteenth century;
the idea that modern medicine, far from having its origin in altruistic
humanisms, developed out of the State’s concern for the management of the
’bio-mass’, i.e., the population of bodies. Foucault reminds us that all
discourse has an inbuilt censoring function which represses the intrinsic
strangeness of symbolism and that the first step in analysis is to recognize this as
a way of ’enlightening’ ourselves. Thus enlightenment takes on a new aspect

here. For Kant, enlightenment was a rational but still normalized mode of
critical thought. For Foucault, enlightenment is the experience of sudden and
spontaneous insight when one is seized by a power beyond rational, conscious
thought, i.e., by the auratic. Foucault reveals the experience of estranging
enlightenment most notably through his adaptation of Nietzsche’s method of
genealogy (Foucault 1977a: 139-164). Genealogy is opposed to the search for
pure and ideal forms which pre-exist our profane, everyday world. Instead, the
genealogist finds that ideal essences, essential truths, are fabrications taken
from ’alien forms’. What we find at the so-called origin of things is not a
reassuring state of perfection, now lost but still reclaimable; instead there is
disparity, difference, indeterminacy. Foucault’s genealogical method is
therefore similar to Lyotard’s agonistics and Derrida’s deconstruction: all deny
the concept of a perfect origin and substitute for it a process of differential
contestation. For this reason, Habermas criticizes Foucault (and the
postmodernists in general) for being ’irrational’. Habermas (1984) considers
reason to be conditional on a concept of the perfect origin; his ’communicative

rationality’ presupposes just such an ideal state. But the logic of postmodern
thought starts from a different understanding of reason, one that appears at
times more veraciously argued than that of rival positions. It is a rationality that
is based not on finding answers to problems but of ’proble mizing’ answers. This
is entirely consistent with the genealogical position which says that disparity
(and not parity) is the source of human structures: answers are merely
temporary inversions of problems. Whereas Habermas is looking for the
answer (or at least an approach to it), Foucault can only see answers as ways of

short-circuiting problems, as expressions of the ’haste of wanting to know’. His

analysis always proceeds from the complex process of how thoughts are
structured so as to give a solution. In the human world, this is always subject to
the work of power, inevitably because power is intrinsic to the agonistic logic of

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102

disparity. Discourse is the expression of power that is centred on problems.

,’!’ Power
precedes the answer through its subtle and covert prior structuring of
the problem. This is why Foucault is so concerned with ’problemizing’, since
the proper understanding of a solution can only be got from seeing how the
problem was structured in the first place. All of Foucault’s work deals with this
issue in one way or another: the development of the problem of madness in
l’ medieval times, the origin of modern medical discourse with the organization
of specialist clinics and hospitals in the eighteenth century; the rise of the social
. -

sciences as devices for structuring problems so as to make them more amenable

to management and administration.
Discourse is no longer a neutral means for communicating about the world.
Instead, it is the discourse of difference and self-reference. It is no longer an
extension of human organs or faculties; it is the latter that are extensions of
. ,
discourse.

, &dquo;I, ,
’I .

Organizational Analysis .

The object of orthodox organizational analysis is the organization: a bounded

.

social system, with specific structures and goals which acts more or less
’

rationally and more or less coherently. Within this context, the concept of
.

organization itself functions as a metadiscourse to legitimate the idea that

.

organization is a social tool and an extension of the human agent, an ’auxiliary

..
organ’ by which ’man has ... become a kind of prosthetic God’ (Freud 1961:
.

92) in pursuit of the idea of anthropocentric order. Bell’s (1974) account of the
modern corporation represents the apotheosis of this idea. Now the cognitive
’

mode of this form of organization is based on what Varela (1979) calls the
’control’ image of the ’computer gestalt’ which, like Lyotard’s systems of
>

performativity, programmes itself in order to optimize its overall input-output

ratio (Lytotard 1984). Since inputs must ’correspond’ to outputs, the computer
gestalt is a referential model of organization which employs information/
knowledge (discourse) in a fixed, operational and ’instructive’ sense. However,
.

Varela reminds us that referentiality is merely a special or limiting case of

self-referentiality so that the latter has to be seen as the more encompassing
(Varela 1979: 265-267). Varela wants us to see organization as a product of
.

self-reference and thus decentre the role of rational purpose.

It is common for social scientists to think about social systems, and perhaps
especially organizations, from the referential point of view, even when their
..
explicit purpose is understanding rather than social engineering. This of course
is a recognized criticism of the systems paradigm whose functional emphasis
serves to suppress the action of difference and self-reference (Cooper 1986).
.

We see such suppression at work in Blau’s theory of organization which relies

centrally on the concept of ’differentiation’ (Blau 1974). By ’differentiation’,
’
Blau means the divisions of labour (specialization) and authority. Since he is
,,
predisposed to viewing organizations within the functional (i.e., referential)

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 103

perspective of the computer gestalt the ’defining criterion of formal

-

organization ... is the existence of procedures for mobilizing and coordinating

the efforts of various, usually specialized, subgroups in the pursuit of joint
objectives’ (Blau 1974: 29) Blau is then led to place the emphasis on
-

specialization and authority rather than on differentiation, i.e., the perceptual

centring on ’control’ seduces him into defining structure in terms of static
difference, the active nature of difference becoming hidden from awareness
and therefore unavailable to analysis. Like most theorists, Blau begins his
analysis from a position which omits the originary step of differentiation or
division in social organization. Organization therefore appears already
formed.
It is exactly this issue that is raised in Mayntz’s criticism of the dominant models
of organizational decision-making for being normativelv rational: goals are set
by the organization and this step is followed by a search for the best solution
from competing alternatives (Mayntz 1976). Thus, ’action appears to be
touched off by preconceived goals or purposes’ (Mayntz 1976: 119). Mayntz
reverses this order of decision analysis by suggesting that organizational

processes are in reality reactions to ’local’ perturbations: ’organizational

activity in general and policy-making in particular is primarily triggered by
situational factors which constitute a pressure to act, rather than being
generated by deliberations on how certain abstract values can be achieved’
(Mayntz 1976: 119). This criticism also significantly emphasizes the ’interac-
tive’ or ’agonistic’ nature of organizational activity for Mayntz reminds us that,
in contrast to the normative-rational model, decisions are rarely, if ever, taken
by individuals but are invariably embedded in an active network of people
within a division of labour.
Mayntz’s criticism is reflected in similar analyses by writers in fields as diverse
as economic development, technological research and development, and

policy-making (Hirschman and Lindblom 1962). This gist of this work is that
there are no perfect theoretical solutions to problems which we can prepare in
advance and that decisions have to be made as remedial moves in situations
marked by uncertainty, disorder and imbalance. In these analyses, practice
usurps theory, and organization, far from being a structure of calculated,
deliberate actions, is in reality the automatic response to an impending threat.
The analyses thus suggest that rational control subserves a more fundamental
process which acts autonomously in much the same way that Varela suggests
that referentiality subserves self-referentiality (Varela 1979). In short, the
process of organization is self-originating and automatic.
Insights into this alternative way of thinking about organization may be
sporadically discerned in the literature of social and organizational analysis.
Gouldner’s concept of ’functional autonomy’, which states, among other
things, that organizational activity is focussed on the boundaries or divisions
between system parts, is an early recognition of self-reference at work in formal
organizations (Gouldner 1959). Specifically, Gouldner argues that organiza-
tional divisions exert an autonomous pressure on organizational activities

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104

because they are the source of paradoxical interactions constituted by the

mutuality of ’separation’ and ’joining’. The theme of self-reference also
pervades Merton’s analyses of social systems: the formal rationality of
bureaucracy paradoxically produces ’dysfunctions’ alongside its ’functions’
(Merton 1968: Ch. 8); social beliefs may function as ’self-fulfilling prophecies’
(Merton 1968: Ch. 13); intentional social actions may lead to unintended
consequences (Merton 1976: Ch. 8). Despite Merton’s recognition of the
interplay between the referential and the self-referential, his bias (as a
self-confessed functionalist) is towards the former so that a fuller understand-
ing of self-reference itself is left, finally, in mid-air. Nonetheless, these brief
references to the social science literature do indicate an awareness of two
opposed ways of thinking about organization: (1) a ’control’ model which is
referential, instructional and conceived as the expression of human rationality;
(2) an ’autonomy’ model which is self-referential, processual (i.e., without
fixed location) and which acts automatically, i.e., independently of external
(human) control. The ’control’ model approximates the modernist view of the
world, especially in the idea of the ultimate rational subject who can
’meta-organize’, In contrast, the ’autonomy’ model approximates the
arguments of postmodernism, especially the rejection of the omniscient,
rational subject.
Postmodern thought begins with the insight that all discourse suffers from an
intrinsic reactivitv and this has to be addressed as a problem before the
epistemological possibilities of the ’autonomy’ model can be properly realized.
Hirschman and Lindblom characterize the reactivity problem as the tendency
of rational actions to be remedial, i.e., ’they move away from ills rather than
toward known objectives’ (Hirschman and Lindblom 1962: 216). If this
diagnosis can also be applied to academic discourse, we can perhaps begin to
see that the dice are already loaded against the development of postmodern

methodology in the social sciences. Postmodern analysis confronts this issue

with Nietzsche’s genealogical method. As we have noted, genealogy defines
difference in terms of the active-reactive distinction. The active and reactive
are, respectively and roughly, Varela’s (1979) concepts of ’autonomy’ and
’control’, except that in Nietzsche’s formulation the former are regarded as
forces, sources of power, rather than just intellectual concepts. The active is the
’essential priority of spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces
that give new interpretations and directions’ ( Deleuze 1983: 41 ) but which must
be tamed, even denied, by the countervailing forces of the reactive which thus
function remediallv.
The genealogical displacement of difference from mere concept to active force
is effectively the inversion of the traditional (i.e., referential) understanding of
difference as a static effect of separation (such as we saw in Blau’s use of
’differentiation’) to an awareness of difference as active co-dependence; from
simple division to unitary flow, from isolated term to interactive process. A
definitive feature of autonomous systems is their intrinsic resistance to division,
partialization and classification. Viewed in this way, an organization is a unity

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 105

or coherence of forces which we lose sight of when we apply the accepted

academic specializations (sociology, psychology, economics, political science,
etc.) and methodologies. In the latter, we merely represent the structures of
social systems, the representations being representations for a subject who (or
which) attempts to appropriate and master the system as a field of knowledge.
A genealogy of system and organization begins with the recognition that
representations and structures derive from a more fundamental process of
materiality and energy. Ideas, images, discourse itself, are now to be viewed as
a material force that dissolves the conception of the human world as a series of
divisions. This view is elaborated in a key postmodern text by Deleuze and
Guattari in which social ’bodies’ are defined as productive ’machines’ which are
continually engaged in the processing of matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).
The unitary point of view taken by Deleuze and Guattari rejects the
representation of separate social terms, which means that the concept of the
productive machine applies to everything in the human (and natural) world:
machines are individuals, groups, organizations and whole societies. This
approach also means that we have to reject the usual conception of machines as
extensions of human power; in fact, Deleuze and Guattari argue that man is
actually an appendix of machines. This is because machines are powered by the
irresistible force of the active. In effect, machines produce remorseless flows of
matter-energy; they then divide the flows, codify them and, finally, inscribe the
codifications on the ’body’ (the material source of the flows) in order to
establish boundaries. A simple illustration of this process is the animal which
uses its flow of bodily secretions to mark out its territory; the animal is thus a
machine which produces a habitable territory. By the same token, organiza-
tions are social machines which produce elaborate discourses of information/
knowledge in which human subjects are a necessary part of the material flow on
which the discourses are inscribed. Organizations operate either directly or
indirectly on the world of nature and, because of the self-referential logic of
autonomous systems, this necessarily includes ’human nature’.
The conception of the ’body’ as material flow has two important consequences
for organizational analysis. First, the idea of ’flow’ draws attention to the
essential instability of the human environment, including the human body
itself. There are no absolute constraints in life or nature. ’Nothing in man -
not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for
self-recognition or for understanding other men’ (Foucault 1977a: 153).
Second, the role of the human subject in traditional organizational analysis has
been shaped by certain functional requirements: the subject is a ’decision-
maker’ or a ’worker’, for example; that is, the definition of the subject is
dependent on the prior acceptance of a normative-rational model of
organization. In contrast, the genealogical conception of the subject as a body
in material flow leads us to think of it as a machine that produces itself; it thus
places the subject at the origin of the organizing process instead of seeing it as
an adjunct. These points demand a radical revaluation of the traditional

concept of organization as a circumscribed administrative-economic unit as

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106

well as the methodologiesthat go to define it. Instead, we need to see

organization as a
process that occurs within the wider ’body’ of society and

which is concerned with the construction of objects of theoretical knowledge

centred on the ’social body’: health, disease, emotion, alimentation, labour,
etc. In other words, to understand organizations it is necessary to analyze them
from the outside, as it were, and not from what is already organized. It becomes
a question of analyzing, let us say, the production of organization rather than
the organization of production. Hence the importance of starting from
genealogy rather than from organization itself: organization as an object of
knowledge emerges out of the contestation intrinsic to the logic of difference
and self-reference as we saw, for example, in Hirschman’s study of the
-

reactive origin of modern organization in the eighteenth century as a device to

subject and harness man’s impulsive nature to social and economic production
(Hirschman 1977).
Perhaps the first step towards a postmodern interpretation of organization is

the recognition that all organized human activity is essentially reactive or

defensive. This would then logically imply recognition of the active, especially
as the superior force. These fundamentals are universally absent from
orthodox organization theory. It is difficult, for example, even to catch a
glimpse of the active-reactive dynamic at work in the static picture of
organization drawn in terms of the bureaucratic paradigm (e.g., the
dimensions of authority, structuring of activities, standardization of proce-
dures, etc. ). A massive shift in theoretical perspective would be needed to
translate the bureaucratic model into the active-reactive model, especially to
do justice to the insight that all institutional and organizational activity is
basically self-referential. Postmodern thought begins with the latter thesis and
always comes back to it. We see it constantly at work in Foucault’s analysis of
organizational processes where ’organization’ is viewed as a series of
interrelated rationalities of programmes, technologies and strategies which are
forever beset by the problems of recursion endemic to self-reference (Gordon
1980). A programme is, minimally, a set of instructions for achieving a goal.
Less obviously, it presupposes a knowledge of the field on which it is to operate
by rendering reality ’in the form of an object which is programmable’ (Gordon
1980: 248). The programme is therefore a version of Mayntz’s (1976)
normative-rational model of organization as well as invoking Bell’s (1974)
protypical post-industrial organization which runs on theoretical knowledge.
Built into the programme are ’mechanisms of correct functioning’ which in
social systems appear as norms of appropriate behaviour for individuals and
collectives. Now the norm itself is a product of techniques of normalization
which structure discourse in terms of the correct-incorrect, the desirable-
undesirable, etc. In fact, the programme becomes actual to the extent that it is
supported by a technology. There is thus a co-dependent (i.e. self-referential)
relation ’between the programmatic and the technological, the normal and the
normative’ which ’is in turn the outcome of the conceptualization within the
discursive form of the programme itself of an ineluctable discrepancy between

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 107

discourse and actuality’ (Gordon 1980: 250). This is because the peculiar logic
of self-reference dictates that terms necessarily contain their own opposites, as
we have seen, and this means that for every programme there is an

un-programme, for every norm there is an ab-norm. Deviations and errors are
no longer to be thought of as adventitious effects of imperfect rationality for

they are built into the very instruments which seek to annul them. Programmes
and technologies are therefore, in this odd sense, anti-functional. Among other
things, this means that ’every programme caters in advance for the eventuality
of its own failure’ (Gordon 1980: 250). Foucault instances prisons as
organizations which, while continually besieged by their failure to attain their
planned goals as reformatories, have sought just as continually to reorganize
themselves on the model of their original but failed programme:

’One should ... recall that the movement of reforming the prisons, for controlling
their functioning, is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated
in a recognition of failure. Prison &dquo;reform&dquo; is virtually contemporary with the prison
itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme. From the outset, the prison was caught
up in a series of accompanying mechanisms, whose purpose was apparently to correct it,
but which seem to form part of its very functioning, so closely have they been bound up
with its existence throughout its long history.’ (Foucault 1977b: 234)

It would be hard to find a more telling example of organization as remedial

reaction which, as it were, thinks on its feet. Here we have the work of strategies
which, in contrast to the normative rationality of the programme, are pragma-
tic, instinctive and improvizational. Strategy operates at the level of practice
rather than theory. This is because its action occurs in a complex and hetero-
geneous field of instantaneous forces where it exploits ’possibilities which it
itself discerns and creates ... strategy is the arena of the cynical, the promis-
cuous, the tacit, in virtue of its general logical capacity for the synthesis of the
heterogeneous’ (Gordon 1980: 2~1). Strategy operates at the labyrinthine core
of organization the eye of the vortex
-

where difference and self-reference

-

reign. In emphasizing this level of institutional action, postmodern analysis

wishes to draw our attention to the central role of autonomy (in Varela’s sense)
or the machine (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) in social systems. It is this

primary force which, via the level of strategy, animates programmes and
technologies rather than the reverse.
Lyotard (1977) provides an illuminating analysis of strategy at work in his
concept of the mise-en-scène, the complex play of operations which make the
basic components of social organization ’come alive’. In the organizational
context, we are faced with a set of primary data constituted by programmes and
technologies. These are essentially groups of discourses belunging to different
systems of rationality (legal, economic, scientific, etc. ). They thus represent a
heterogeneous field with two noteworthy features: it is ’inert’ and, because of
its diverse origins, it has a potential for ’disorder’. The niise-en-sc811e lays hold
B

of this intractable space and ’gives it life’. To ’give life’ means to transcribe the
inert discourses of programmes and technologies onto living bodies. The
’

transcription involves the translation of the inert and heterogeneous into the
elementary unity of the ’pulyesthetic’ human body considered as a ’multi-

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108

sensory potentiality’ with its ’capacity to see, to hear, to touch, to move ...’
(Lyotard 1977: 88). It involves a movement from the referential register of
programmes and technologies to the self-referential register of the mise-en-
scène, which now has to be understood as the active origin of organization.
Organizations do not first pre-exist and then create their relationships; they
occur in existential gaps which lie beyond knowledgeable discourse. These

gaps are the loci of operation of mise-ell-scènes and strategies which focus their
attentions on, and emerge out of, the unprogrammable and non-discursive.
Organized rationality, far from originating in beau-ideals and consummate
logics of efficiency, is founded on sleight-of-hand, vicious agonisms and
pudenda origo (’shameful origins’). This is the revisionary lesson that
postmodernism brings to organizational analysis.

Post Scriptum
Let us remind ourselves that the subject of organizational analysis is formal
organization. organization as such that demands analysis but its
It is not
’formal’ character, though this is often forgotten. Ordinarily, the word ‘formal’
signifies what is proper, methodical, and punctilious. In the context of
formal organizations and institutions, the ’formal’ is not just the proper and
methodical but also the ‘official’; it becomes raised to the level of law and public
truth. What is formally organized takes on the virtue of a moral order. Hence
the emphasis in modernism on the search for ’rational authority’ as the basis of
the good social order. But the logic of human discourse insists that every
symbol carries within it its own opposite, so that the ’formal’ is continually
shadowed by the ’informal’, Douglas (1970: 100) develops this opposition
within the context of social organization: ’Formality signifies social distance,
well-defined, public, insulated roles. Informality is appropriate to role
confusion, familiarity, intimacy’. In other words, the ’formal’ has all the
characteristics of classical reason as conceived by the Enlightenment: it is
referential, transparent, closed, monumental. ’These are the terms of
Foucault’s &dquo;regimen&dquo; and Weber’s &dquo;rationalization&dquo;, the strong forms of
functional purity which, certainly by the eighteenth century in England, led to
the great age of &dquo;institutionalizing&dquo; asylums, hospitals, schools, barracks,
-

prisons, insurance and finance houses which, as Foucault has suggested,

-

embody and assure the maintenance of classical bourgeois reason’ (Stallybrass

and White 1986: 22). As Douglas’ definition suggests, the ’informal’ is that
which threatens to transgress the ’formal’, it is the local and immediate, that
which resists categorization and rationalization. In short, the ’informal’ is the
self-referential and as such it is the special province of postmodern analysis.
We have already noted that modernism puts the answer before the question
and thus acts on the principle that it ’already knows’. It thus privileges the idea
of formal organization (i.e., the organization of the’formal’) while at the same
time rationalizing away the existence of the ’informal’. It is not difficult to see

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 109

this process at work in the literature of contemporary organizational analysis

which unknowingly repeats the formalized structures of organization in its own
methodology. Various studies of organizations have identified ’formalization’
as a major feature of organizational structure (e.g., Hall 1972: 172-199). To

simplify, these studies indicate that formalization is concerned with the

definition and maintenance of ’correct’ behaviour or what we here call the
’formal’. As we noted, behind the idea of the ’formal’ is a moral imperative
(i.e. , an ’order’) which demands the total exclusion of the ’Informal’ (which
now becomes the ‘immoral’). It is this process of exclusion that constitutes the

already-made-up-mind of formalism and of course it is present in all

formalizations, including those that make up the methodologies of organiza-
tional analysis. Let us briefly illustrate this idea with the concept of
’uncertainty’ which has received extensive treatment in various areas of
organizational analysis (e.g., decision-making, technology, environment). In
these analyses, the indeterminateness intrinsic to uncertainty (by definition, an
aspect of the ‘informal’) is viewed in terms of the ‘formal’, e.g., the well-known
framework that reduces task uncertainty to the ’non-routine’, thus defining
uncertainty from the point of view of the ’routine’, i.e., the certain (see, e.g.,
Perrow 1972: 166-167). The same tendency to formalize the unformalizable
can be seen at work in Luhmann’s (1976) analysis of uncertainty in complex,

organized systems where, among other things, the concept of self-reference is

discussed entirely in referential (i.e., determinate) terms. In short, formal
organization is characterized by an inveterate urge to suppress its own opposite
in such a covert way that we remain unaware of its censoring function.
The task of postmodern thought is to expose the censoring function of
formalization and, what is more, to show that the ’Informal’ actually constitutes
the ’formal’. The ’formal’ and ’informal’ reflect each other like the obverse and
reverse sides of a coin; to the extent that they can never be separated, they are
not just mutually-defining but can be said to be the ’same’ or self-referential. It
is from this point of view that writers such as Foucault and Derrida view and
analyze the ‘formal’, so that it is no longer a privileged and unassailable site in
social discourse. The purpose of Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of formal
organization at the time of, and subsequent to, the Industrial Revolution is to
show how the ’formal’ was constructed out of the ’informal’ through the
processes of discipline and normalization. Significantly, the style of discourse
he employs to do this is itself ’Informal’, e.g., the modern reader’s
understanding of ’organization’ is turned upside down by Foucault’s depiction
of it as a ’disciplinary technology’. The normalized world of formal institutions
becomes part of the grotesque side of life. The concept of power is similarly
reversed when one is forced to view it from an ’informal’ or self-referential
perspective. Formal views of power are centred on such formalized units as
’individuals’ or ’organizations’ and one is led to think of power as a kind of
property that is owned and manipulated by such social units. The ’informal’
perspective makes us see power as an autonomous system of compulsion which
works through formal systems of discipline and organization. One consequence

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110

of this is that social science disciplines such as psychology and sociology

themselves become formal discourses that normalize and anaesthetize us to the
’informal’ substrata of human life. Postmodernism reveals formal organization
to be the ever-present expression of an autonomous power that masquerades as
the supposedly rational constructions of modern institutions.
These considerations lead us to the general observation that two radically
different systems of thought and logic are at work in the modernist-
postmodernist confrontation. There is some reason to believe that they are
fundamentally irreconcilable because they derive from that basic split in the
structure of human logic associated with the ’formal’-‘informal’ distinction
which has been exacerbated by the extension of formal organization into so
many facets of modern life. In fact, it may be more appropriate to view these
competing views on organized systems less as competing conceptual positions
and more as symptoms of the problematic that they aim to analyse and
understand. It is this angle that we shall pursue in taking the work of Foucault,
Derrida, Habermas and Luhmann as subjects for more detailed and systematic
exposition of the modernist-postmodernist debate in relation to the study of
organized systems in subsequent issues of Organi~ation Studies, On the
postmodern side, Foucault and Derrida have dealt, in their different ways,
disabling body blows to the traditionally unquestioned pillars of modern
institutionalized thought, centring their analyses on the organized and even
manufactured status of the discourse used to support these pillars. On the
modern side, Habermas has been vigorous in his criticisms of Foucault and
Derrida, defending particularly the concept of critical and responsible human
agency (which postmodernism puts in question) against the massive,
machine-like instrumentalization of social life by large-scale formal systems;
Luhmann’s response to the progress of complex, organized systems is more
benign, for he is the cartographer of modern, instrumental systems whose
analyses tell us how to find our way about them. The significance of these four
thinkers in the present context lies in their counterpointing of issues and
concepts that lie at the heart of the organizing process, for they deal essentially
with the same themes differentiation, power, authority, discipline, etc.
- -

but produce radically different interpretations of them. It is this agonistic

rivalry sometimes overt, sometimes mute that in our view brings out the
- -

relevance of the modernist-postmodernist debate for the reinvigoration of

analysis of social systems in general and organizations in particular.

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Certeau. M. de. Habermas, J.

1986 Heterologies. Manchester: Manches- 1972 Knowledge and human interests. Lon-
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