strategy schmategy
A tense status distinction exists between organizational theory and strategy research. Both fields make up much of what counts as macro research in organizational studies. Arguably, organizational theory has higher status. This status differential is the result of OT’s close association with a discipline (sociology), its editorial stranglehold of the most elite specialty journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and because it tends to generate basic research. Strategy research, in contrast, tends to rely more on economics although the discipline of economics does not openly embrace it, has less representation in ASQ, and is seen (and even openly touted by its supporters) as a more applied field of research. I once heard a prominent strategy scholar put down a presentation because it didn’t provide a good answer to the question, “how does this help managers improve performance?” Strategy research is defined by this question. While the question obviously has merit from a manager’s perspective – and this is probably why strategy scholars are in higher demand right now than OT scholars – the question seems to degrade the scholarly contribution of strategy as a field. Seen from Abbott’s status perspective, OT attains higher status because it is purer in form than strategy, which is tainted by its emphasis on application.
Now, of course, I’m an OTist, so you might expect me to hold an attitude like this. Why wouldn’t I value pure over applied? But the point of this post is not to put down strategy research at all. In fact, I want to offer praise. Rather than blame strategy for being what it is, I want to suggest that strategy research has surpassed OT in one important way and that this superiority should really bug the purists in OT. Strategy scholars, love ‘em or hate ‘em (and I do love ‘em), care about the organization. They study why the organization acts the way it does so they can better understand how its behavior, structures, goals, etc. affect performance. By focusing so narrowly on one specific dependent variable, strategy scholars have been forced to delve into the inner-workings of the organization, exploring its governance structures, decision-making, culture…. If it is organizational, there is a high likelihood that strategy scholars have studied it. Strategy scholarship even has its own theory of the organization – the resource-based view – which is flexible enough to incorporate insights from other theories to provide explanations for how organizations use various resources to develop competitive advantages.
What about organizational theorists? What have they been doing while strategy scholars have been focusing on the organization? Well, in some ways, they’ve been studying everything but the organization, e.g. the market, institutions, populations, etc. While OT has developed great insights over the last 30 years, it’s safe to say that most of these ideas have something to do with the stuff that goes on outside of organizations. Most of what we know about the internal workings of organizations is either carried over from the theory that developed in the previous 30 years or it is imported from strategy. Studying organizations as unique structural entities has waned in OT.
This is unfortunate from my point of view. If organizational theorists have a distinctive competence, it should be their ability to explain the organization and make predictions about what happens inside them. I’m just not sure that this is the case anymore. I’m not the only one who thinks this way. In a paper published last year, Gavetti, Levinthal, and Ocasio say:
[I]recent years the organizations field as a whole has become decidedly less organizational in its focus. Arguably, the most important developments in organizational theory in the last two decades have corresponded to the increasing understanding of and theorizing about the environment and broader social context in which organizations operate. In this respect, “macro” organizational theory has begun to parallel, in some fashion, the neoclassical theory of the firm in which the “firm” is a relatively vacuous structure that serves as the elementary unit in a theory of markets (pg. 524).
Now I’m not suggesting that we all throw in the towel and become strategy scholars. I’m not even suggesting that we invent new theories of the organization. What I am suggesting is that there is ample room available for scholars who are interested in studying the organization for its own sake using available theoretical tools. Take, for example, all of the research on categories, identities, and audiences – what can that tell us about how organizations work and organize themselves? What can those theories tell us about the internal workings of organizations? Questions like these are under-investigated.
As you might suspect, I have more to say about this. In a future post I’ll propose a perspective that I think provides a theoretical anchor in the study of the organization as a unique social entity.
Word! Word!
A question I have is “what happened to the Carnegie school?” Great way to think about internal org matters, but find me any contemporary sociologist who’s rooted in that work? And no, a drive by citation to garbage can models does *not* count! It’s even harder to find modern follow ups to Blau/Schonerr, etc.
But here’s a small rejoinder: Brayden, how about all that post-Marxist work on controlling workers in firms? Very much about internal workings of the firm, though from a critical perspective.
fabiorojas
November 30, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Fabio: Good point, but where is all that post-Marxist stuff now? It’s certainly not a thriving sub-industry of organizational sociology.
brayden
November 30, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Great post, Brayden! I wonder if Weick’s “Substitutes for Strategy” is a useful marker of this issue. In a sense, he proposed to “substitute” organizing for strategizing, and he actually proposed that managers make this substitution, not just researchers. I think are lots of problems with his argument here, but he’s right that strategic and organizational thinking are sometimes substitutable (though not always wisely).
Also, I think “the organization as a unique social entity” is a very interesting theme. Looking forward to that post. I have a feeling that OT might well become a (good) substitute fot sociology … on many issues.
Thomas Basbøll
November 30, 2008 at 7:34 pm
BK: I guess if your question is “What’s trendy in OT?” then the post-Marxist stuff is nowhere to be seen. However, if you question is where in sociology are good internal descriptions of firms/orgs, then you have a lot more to choose from. If you believe what I just wrote, then the relevant question is “how did the boundaries of OT/org soc stop including internal org theory?” Or, is Paul DiMaggio the owner of the One Ring of Orgtheory?
fabiorojas
November 30, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Thomas – Weick’s focus on organizing, in some sense, moves too far in the opposite direction. If organizations are nothing more than a bunch of interactions, then what makes organizations different from other social spheres, e.g., communities or markets? I’d like to see a focus more squarely on the organization itself.
Fabio – Sure, by saying that post-Marxist theory is nowhere to be found in org. theory I was simply pointing out that it doesn’t seem to be the focus of contemporary organizational theory but not that it shouldn’t be. The same could be said of the Carnegie School, as you pointed out. I’d love to see more Gouldner-esque or Burawoy-like studies of bureaucracy and management. They’re classics for a reason. Like I said before, I think there’s ample room for this kind of analysis.
There is some good OT work that fills this niche. You could cite Cal Morrill’s studies on conflict management or Tim Hallet’s and Marc Ventresca’s reanalysis of the gypsum mine as examples of research that do take the organization-level seriously; however, these studies stand out precisely because they are exceptions.
brayden
November 30, 2008 at 9:07 pm
I agree with you, Brayden. I just thought Weick marks the issue nicely by being a high-status org theorists with (at least in this specific sense) a low opinion of strategy. (In other ways he’s very much a high-status strategy theorist with a low opinion of organization proper.)
I think a more robust notion of organizations (one that is clearly distinguished from markets, communities, etc.), however, will go a long way, in the coming decades, towards explaining social conditions. My prediction is that we are entering an “age of organization”. But I’m sure I’m inclined by institutional factors to feel that way.
Thomas Basbøll
November 30, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Or, is Paul DiMaggio the owner of the One Ring of Orgtheory?
Three Cites for Ecologists, in their niches high,
Seven for Networkers on their concrete thrones,
Nine for ASQ one-offs doomed to die,
One for Paul & Woody in their Grey Haven home,
And that 1983 paper, where Isomorphisms lie.
One Cite to rule them all, One Cite to find them,
One Cite to bring them all and in a deceptively simple three-part typology bind them
In DiMaggio & Powell (1983), where Isomorphisms lie.
Kieran
December 1, 2008 at 2:43 am
Damn, more Irish poetry power!!
fabiorojas
December 1, 2008 at 4:23 am
[...] is Paul DiMaggio the owner of the One Ring of Orgtheory?” In true Irish form, Kieran dropped this bomb, which’ll be posted on b-school doors for decades to come: Three Cites for Ecologists, in [...]
kieran: orgtheory poet laureate « orgtheory.net
December 1, 2008 at 4:33 am
[...] also is promising as it might nudge organization theory from its overly strong emphasis — see Brayden’s post — on everything but the organizational actor itself — in OT, largely the environment [...]
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December 1, 2008 at 7:05 am
Its an interesting insight, but I don’t think that Org Theory has abandoned the organization as much as there has been a realization that the organization is no longer an entity unto itself; a world separate which has boundaries that delineate rules internal to the organization.
I think this is partly an artifact of history. Org Theory came of age at a time when organizations were more or less little worlds unto themselves. Mike Piore and I have a little vignette in a paper we wrote about the shift over time in the legal status of organizations by contrasting the logic in the Supreme Court’s 1960 decision known as the Steelworkers Trilogy and a 1992 case involving Toyota:
“The steelworkers’ trilogy is the last of a series of cases in which the Court fashioned the law governing arbitration under collective agreements in the new deal regime. ‘The collective bargaining agreement,’ the Court argues,“. . . calls into being a new common law—the common law of a particular industry or of a particular plant [emphasis added].” Only the arbitrator, an insider chosen by the parties, is in a position to interpret that law, and hence the Court binds itself to defer to his opinion. The Toyota case, decided forty years later, concerns the definition of disability in a case alleging discrimination in employment. It overturns a lower court decision that defines disability narrowly in relationship to the particular tasks of the job in the workplace in question. ‘This,’ the court asserts, ‘was an error. . . . The central inquiry must be whether the claimant is unable to perform the variety of tasks central to most people’s daily lives, not whether the claimant is unable to perform the tasks associated with her specific jobs. . . . [not] by analyzing the effect of the impairment in the workplace. . . . [H]ousehold chores, bathing, and brushing one’s teeth are among the types of manual tasks of central importance to people’s daily lives, and should have been part of the assessment of whether respondent was substantially limited in performing manual tasks.’ Thus, the employment rights regime is based on an entirely new conception of how society and the economy relate to each other as the Toyota decision makes clear. The notion of a strict distinction between the two realms—a
la Weber—is gone and, in this sense, the new regime is more universal. It incorporates elements of what had been reserved for the home sphere back into the economic.
Upshot: the Weberian distinction between society and economy (and in particular, between organization and broader environment) has blurred. So, yes, of course, DiMaggio and Powell’s piece moved us in that direction (though, of course, Stinchombe had done it a generation earlier). As the world in which organizations exist has become less tolerant of the notion that organizations exist as islands unto themselves, so have our theories.
Sean
December 1, 2008 at 5:27 pm
“…as much as there has been a realization that the organization is no longer an entity unto itself; a world separate which has boundaries that delineate rules internal to the organization.”
The question for me is how much, then, do we pack into org theory itself — theoretical efforts, after all, are about parsimoniously focusing on the key variables, abstracting from reality. So, do we emphasize the environment, the organization itself, the individuals that compose the collective etc? — including all of this seems too unwieldy and does not make for parsimonious explanation. Though, one angle also might be to just say that different theories attack different parts of the elephant (and obviously, different org’l phenomena), though that of course begs the question of whether the various theories agree (often they don’t) and whether all the parts then somehow create a coherent story.
tf
December 1, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Sean – Of course I agree with you that reverting to a conception of organizations as disembedded, atomistic actors is a bad idea. My own research is a product of environmentally-oriented theoretical perspectives. But focusing on the organization doesn’t mean throwing the environment out the window. In fact, one of the exemplars of organization-focused analysis, in my view, is Selznick and his theory was very attentive to environmental factors. I would argue that his work (especially Leadership in Administration) is underrated in this respect.
What I’m calling for is more sensitivity to what makes organizations organizational. As we’ve moved to higher levels of analysis, we’ve consequently moved to higher levels of abstraction to the point that, like GL&O argue, the organization is a vacuous entity – a nondescript node in a network, a monolithic reflection of its environment, etc. On the other side, there are some who are pushing for a view of a post-organizational world in which work takes place solely through relationships and interactions. Organizations-focused research ought to be somewhere in the meaty middle (e.g., how do characteristics of organizations mediate or even alter environmental influence? how does organizational structure moderate organizing processes?). Maybe a less pushy way of saying this is that there is a lot of room in the middle for scholars to take advantage of when developing their research projects.
brayden
December 1, 2008 at 6:35 pm
[...] Brayden has a nice post at our good-twin blog, orgtheory.net, on the differences between organization theory and strategy research. Writing from the perspective of an organizational sociologist, Brayden argues that organization theory is a higher-status, “purer” discipline, but that strategy research asks better questions and is providing more insight into organizations than organization theory. [...]
Organizational Economics versus Strategy « Organizations and Markets
December 2, 2008 at 2:48 pm