the changing face of organizational studies

Brayden

Jim March is considered by many to be the most influential living organizational theorist. As such, we should probably care what March thinks about the state of the field. In the keynote address of the 2006 EGOS conference (which was published in the January 2007 issue of Organization Studies), March talked about how the field has changed since he entered it in the post-WWII era. He claims that organizational studies has gone through three main phases of change (or invasions, as he calls it).

• Post-WWII – the massive growth in organizational studies resulted from the sudden increase in the supply of scholars, many immigrating from Europe. The new field was shaped by a mix of these European intellectual sensibilities and a North American appreciation for behavioral science.
• Protests of the 1960s and 70s – The negative impact of the Vietnam War and the social revolution of the 1960s made way for a new breed of scholars who embraced a more critical perspective of organizations. The new organizational scholars were more diverse and willing to push the envelope.
• The triumph of markets – Following the fall of the Soviet bloc, decentralized, efficient markets became seen as the answer to society’s problems. Organizational scholars embraced this view as well as they began to take a more business-friendly view of the organization.

The latter invasion was accompanied by a change in location, with most organizational studies moving over to the business school. March does not see this shift in academic function as entirely benign. He argues that it has had some serious consequences on the kind of theorizing and research that organizational scholars do.

The business school context is not a neutral one:

• It encourages the mutual isolation of business school scholars of organizations and disciplinary scholars.
• Insofar as it encourages contact with the disciplines, it makes contact with ideas from economics more likely, and contact with ideas from the sciences, psychology, sociology, or political science less likely.
• It focuses research on the private sector, reducing the attention to institutions of the public sector that characterized much early work in the field.
• It brings an emphasis on the audience of practitioners, on finding the correlates of organizational performance rather than other organizational phenomena.
• It brings an orientation to the problem and possibilities of individual organizations (firms) and less attention to populations of organizations or to ‘organizing.’
• It stimulates an emphasis on organizational strategies, rather than societal strategies (pp. 17-18).

March goes on to argue that business schools have not been friendly to highly-theoretical work of the type pushed by the critical scholars of the 60’s and 70’s and that they have moved organizational studies to take a more applied approach.

These are some of the critiques I often hear thrown at business school-style organizational research (see this post for a similar argument).  I think there’s some obvious validity to them, but the critiques may be overblown.  I’ll follow this post later with some additional comments about the possible benefits of the academic turn in business schools.