S?awomir Magala - WZ UW

S?awomir Magala The Management of Meaning in Organizations 2007
Table of contents
1. Introduction: can values and meanings be outsourced and, if so, to
whom?
2. The past tense of meaning (lost and gained in historical translations) 3. Cases in point a) The return of religious sensemaking: the case of intelligent design
b) Experts, ideologies and the media: the case of Brent Spar oil rig
c) Acceptable inequalities: the case of female IQ (gender and soul inside
the academic brain) 4. The present case of meaning (underground passages between hierarchies,
the cunning of calculating reason and the return of utopian virtues)
a) Patterning the sensemaking processes 1: the professional bureaucracy
cluster and attempts to leave the pyramid behind
b) Patterning the sensemaking processes 2: the commercialization of
interactions and alternatives to iron cage of ranking
c) Patterning the sensemaking processes 3: reconfigurations of agency and
the emergence of multimedia communications 5. Case in point: scaffolding for critical turn in the sciences of
management
6. The future tense of meaning (cultural revolutions, social
transformations and the media rituals) 7. Instead of conclusions; the revenge of populism and the transformation
of mad crowds into mobilized alternative social networks 8. Literature 9. Appendix 1. Track proposal for EURAM 2009, Liverpool 11-14 May 2009
1. Introduction: can values and meanings be outsourced and if so, to whom?
"If it is true that the views of society offered by the sociologists of the
social were mainly a way of insuring civil peace when modernism was under
way, what sort of collective life and what sort of knowledge is to be
gathered by sociologists of association once modernizing has been thrown
into doubt while the task of finding the ways to cohabit remains more
important than ever?"[1] History has many cunning passages. What did T.S. Eliot, a poet and a
critic, mean, when he coined this phrase? He might have been making an
erudite hint at G.W.F. Hegel's famous observation on the cunning of reason
in history. Hegel, the philosopher, referred to the irony of historical
fate, which has mounted "reason" on a horse. Historical events gave a
gifted general of the French revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, imperial power
to spread revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood with
the bayonets of his victorious armies. His Blitzkriegs were cruel to
monarchies and kind to republics. Ironic twists of fate suggesting unseen
deals between personal ambitions and public causes have been noted in many
metaphors used by numerous scientists and philosophers. Adam Smith, an
economist and a philosopher, did not comment on cunning passages between
moral sentiments and the wealth of nations, but he duly commented on the
invisible hand dealing historical cards to human agents linked by their
ability to experience the presence and needs of others. Karl Marx, a
philosopher and a political scientist, persuaded social scientists,
politicians and trade unionists that under the surface of ideological
clashes there was a throbbing heart of class struggles, which dictated the
rhythm of economic and political changes and melted everything that had
been solid into thin air. Our contemporaries, for instance Fernand Braudel,
a historian, and Immanuel Wallerstein, a historian and a sociologist,
traced long processes of the emergence of continental civilizations and
global world-systems, the rise and fall of trade routes, colonial empires
and decolonized globalizations. They and many other researchers and
thinkers, have been digging under the visible, empirically observable,
recorded processes of social, political, economic and cultural exchanges.
They surfaced with critical theoretical reflections on management and
change of complex organizations and societies. Before they surfaced - they
had to descend below the level of observable phenomena, recordable data,
"speakable" acts. Tracing and reconstructing historical flows of trade,
industry, and commerce on a global scale, they had emerged with theories of
civilizations and world-systems as reconstructions of (and perhaps
blueprints for) large-scale transformations of complex societies. Both Braudel and Wallerstein are prominent members of academic community,
but they do not capture a broader public's imagination, in spite of the
fact that they are well known outside of their original disciplines. Our
imagination is captured much more readily by the artists, among them poets
and film makers. The "cunning of reason" and "ironies of historical fate"
remain abstract formulae if deprived of emotional temperature of a work of
art. Ideas have to be translated and dramatized, if they are to move, in
more senses than one. Thinking about history's cunning, secret passages,
one may, for instance, evoke a recent Balkan masterpiece. In one of the
visionary scenes from a movie on civil war in former Yugoslavia two
characters descend to Berlin's underground right in front of the old
Reichstag building. Instead of finding a maze of sewers, wiring and pipes,
which form a large city's soft underbelly, they find themselves at the busy
underground crossroads. Trucks with UN soldiers and refugees, smuggled and
legal cargo, buses, cars and carts rush by. One of the road signs tells
them how far away they are from Athens.[2] The artist makes us wonder how
far we have strayed from the path to democracy symbolized by the name of
the ancient Greek city-state. Looking at this scene one wonders about
democratic deficit of contemporary complex, networked and overlapping,
bureaucratically managed and professionally staffed organizations and
societies. Road signs hidden in Europe's underground point towards Athens,
but aren't our societies heading towards clashes of civilizations outside
of our continent and towards civil wars inside it? Aren't organizations we
spend our working lives in barely able to tame power struggles in
bureaucratic fiefs? Cannot we manage ourselves better? Prevent outbreaks of
hostilities? Stimulate and encourage creativity? Take democracy more
seriously in formal organizations, including professional bureaucracies
thriving on knowledge? Our organizations structure us as agents and imprint
their matrixes upon our lives, but fail to endow us with meaning as
definitely as we imagine Greek urban communities or Italian city states
once did. Our organizations socialize us into professions and guide us into
career paths, but they do not prevent either domestic, intra-organizational
intrigues or disruptions of social interactions; outbreaks of hostilities,
ethnic cleansings, religious clashes, civil wars. Shouldn't we be able to
do more about it? Charity, after all, begins at our bureaucratically
managed, organizational homes. The European filmmaker's vision of the powerful underground flows evokes
other associations, too. One is also reminded of the underground traffic in
smuggled goods, some of them highly illicit, "illegal" and clandestine,
which goes on under the surface of cities and provinces of our complex
cultures and societies. Social, cultural and organizational evolution - due
to the ever present contemporary media and the growth of knowledge - went
public and became much more traceable than ever before. Much more became -
at least potentially - transparent and accessible to educated, informed and
curious individual citizen. We have, indeed, become societies of the
spectacle, and we do rewrite the scripts, modify plots, recast and redirect
the actors and generally speaking scrutinize ourselves much more frequently
than ever before. Novels of the 19th century were supposed to be mirrors
walking down the roads. Contemporary media are more than mirrors. They are
scanners which accompany us everywhere - to our offices and workshops,
bedrooms and sitting-rooms, native villages and foreign metropolies,
individual retreats and collective assemblies. As we go on writing and
reading novels, taking and reviewing photographs, making and watching TV
programs, conducting research and learning about everything, composing
songs and symphonies or listening to them, as we continue praying,
teaching, learning, designing - we are but imperfectly, dimly aware of an
enormous virtual bazaar of ideas and values, enormous flow of material
imports and exports, borrowings and thefts, translations and imitations,
waste dumping and retrievals, recycling and re-branding. The ground beneath
our feet trembles, tectonic shifts and paradigmatic earthquakes never
cease. All of it happens just under the surface of official announcements,
formally endorsed documents, legal explanations, approved expressions,
legitimate interpretations, acceptable justifications, copyrighted
publications, online appearances in virtual cyberspace. This fascinating underground of our symbolic culture's domains merits
closer inspection. If traffic is as lively as we imagine, perhaps borrowed
and lent meanings play a much more significant role in the outsourcing of
interpretations and understandings. After all, values and beliefs have a
very busy social life and they are notorious for masks, which they don on
various occasions, as they slip out of their safe deposits. In