Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of some of the various ways in which sociologists have attended to management activities. The chapter is intended to provide a sense of some of the key themes in the literature, rather than attempting to produce an encyclopedic overview of the various ways in which social scientists have approached management, office and organizations. Reflecting this interest, we specifically address the following traditions and perspectives: (1) structural-functionalist emphases also; (2) Marxist and postmodernist interests; (3) humanistic debates and metaphoric representations; (4) organizational culture approaches; (5) advisory stances and ethno-historical resources; (6) interpretive and pragmatist approaches and (7) interactionist perspectives on individuality, agency and groupness. A more sustained examination of symbolic interaction—the central perspective of this volume—is to be found in Chap. 3.
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Notes
- 1.
Merton (1957), Price (1968) and Donaldson (1996) provide prototypes of this structuralist theoretical emphasis in sociology. The research tradition associated with Gouldner (1957), Michels (1915) and Selznick (1966) may be seen to represent more foundational methodological thrusts. Albeit focused on the limitations of structuralist approaches for the study of power relations, readers may also find Prus (1999) relevant to considerations of organizational routines.
- 2.
Postmodernist analysis has become an intellectual home for those who challenge a more conventionalist Marxist emphasis but who wish to express and justify Marxist-related notions of oppression, alienation and remedial reform. Some may be intrigued by what they define as a postmodernist license for expressivity, playfulness and freedom from more focused scholarship.
- 3.
The Hawthorne studies, while focused on increasing worker productivity, nevertheless, attended to worker relations, in-group dynamics, the experience of being managed, subordinate and superordinate relations, and the influence of observation (i.e., the observer effect) in workplace settings.
- 4.
Weick’s earlier (1969) statement may be more directly located within the realms of structuralist social psychology, but the work has had an enduring (albeit increasingly more prominent) interest in the processual, constructed features of organizational life.
- 5.
- 6.
Writing more than a century ago, Durkheim (1913 [1984]) and Lovejoy (1908 [1963]) specifically draw attention to the comparatively ambiguous definitions of pragmatism in the literature of their day as well as the rather different ways in which the term pragmatism had been used by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Ferdinand Schiller and others.
- 7.
For example, see the edited volume The Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961).
- 8.
- 9.
As well, some interim interpretivist scholars also have explicitly sought to distance themselves from Aristotle. Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes are particularly consequential cases in point. Both Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605 [1885]) and The Great Instauration (1620 [2012]) as well as Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651 [1969]) conceptually are extensively indebted to Aristotle. Nevertheless, and with different agendas in mind, both Bacon and Hobbes denounce Aristotelian scholarship. In the process, these two authors centrally obscured the affinities of pragmatism with classical Greek thought more generally and the works of Aristotle more specifically. These connections would become even more indistinct following the reformation movement that would sweep across Western Europe.
- 10.
Like so many Western terms of reference, pragmatism is derived from the Greek pragma (as in objects , things, substance).
- 11.
Aristotle’s emphasis on language does not exclude the relevance of sensations, objects or activities. Likewise, this emphasis on speech does not exclude people’s encounters with novelty or the unknown. However, the point is that people’s experiences are made meaningful or have the potential to be meaningful insofar as one has linguistically-achieved concepts with which to try to make sense of what that one encounters as a human. This viewpoint is emphasized by Dilthey, Dewey, Mead and Schütz, amongst others.
- 12.
As with many others in the humanities and social sciences, the matters of scholarship and morality have been particular sources of difficulty for the interpretivists. Thus, for instance, whereas Aristotle and Dewey adopt pragmatist viewpoints that are strikingly parallel in many respects, a major source of Dewey’s disaffection with Aristotle appears to revolve around Dewey’s concerted effort to promote democracy as a political system while Aristotle is much less positive about democracy as a viable political order.
- 13.
Given the many affinities that exist between interactionism and the phenomenological/constructionist approaches associated with Berger and Luckmann (1966), Garfinkel (1967) and Schütz (1962, 1964), as well as the hermeneutics of Dilthey (Ermarth 1978), and the more pragmatist or realist (vs. postmodernist) instances of ethnographic research in anthropology, those assuming an interactionist approach also may benefit from studies of organizational life as enacted realms of activity developed by these other scholars.
- 14.
In referencing the symbolic interactionism of Mead (1934) and Blumer (1969) and associating this with the ethnographic research tradition that developed at the University of Chicago (see Prus 1997, for an overview of this literature), we distinguish this from the cultural studies, postmodernist approach of Norman Denzin (1993, 2003) and his associates. Denzin’s approach over time has moved away from a more fully interactionist analysis (e.g. Denzin 1985) to a more structuralist position and takes up more moralist agendas. This transition is exemplified by Denzin’s (2016) volume A Qualitative Manifesto: A Call to Arms.
- 15.
See Prus and Grills (2003) for a more extended discussion of people’s involvements in deviance on both collective and solitary manners.
- 16.
- 17.
Such capacities may be constrained in any number of ways–through illness, isolation, acts of war, access to education, physiological qualities of the individual. Evan’s (1988) discussion of deafness and language development is a helpful discussion of the interactional implications of the lived experience of deafness on language acquisition and the sociology of knowledge.
- 18.
Thus, for example, although the present project focuses primarily on those adopting roles as managers, considerable attention will be given to those with whom managers deal. Some specific depictions of people’s fuller sets of roles in particular theaters of operation, can be found in Cressey (1932), Prus and Grills (2003), Prus and Irini (1980), and Wiseman (1970).
- 19.
Anti-combines legislation place legal restrictions on the activities of office holders within corporations. Specifically these laws are intended to protect free markets from acts intended to restrict competition in the marketplace. For example, collusion to fix prices may be defined as a violation of such legislation. See Goff and Reasons (1978) for an extended discussion of these themes.
- 20.
For example, Erickson’s (1966) Wayward Puritans attends to generic deviance processes in the context of the New England witch and warlock trials of 1692.
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Grills, S., Prus, R. (2019). Understanding Management: Depicting Management Activities. In: Management Motifs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93429-7_2
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