ORGANIZATIONS AS POWER STRUGGLES

One of the most influential lines of analysis that came out of Frankfurt was more directly a confrontation and synthesis of the Weberian and Marxian approaches. At the University of Frankfurt -- not the Marxian institute for, social research -- the chair of sociology was held by Karl Mannheim. Mannheim became famous in 1929 with his book Ideology and Utopia, a work that turned the Marxist theory of ideology against the Marxists themselves. If conservative ideologies represent the interests of the dominant class, the political claims of the working class are equally ideological and take the form of utopias. Even more important for the development of conflict sociology was a Weberian theme that Mannheim developed in his next book, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, written in exile from the Nazis in 1935. Following Weber, Mannheim pointed out that organizations can operate by two different types of rationality. There is substantial rationality: the human insight into how certain means lead to certain ends. This is the kind of rationality that we usually exalt, that is supposed to be the hallmark of our unsuperstitious, scientific, professionalized era. But there is a second type of rationality that has become even more

-94-

prominent: the functional (or formal) rationality of bureaucratic organizations. Here rationality becomes the following of rules and regulations, going by the book, which is supposed to cover comprehensively the most efficient way to function.

The formal type of rationality tends to undercut the substantial type. As we have become more enlightened and scientifically expert, we have embodied our expertise in massive organizations that no longer think in a human way, but merely follow general procedures. The oiganization develops an inertia of its own and slips out of human control. Mannheim had in mind the military arms races carried on by government bureaucracies from the beginning of the twentieth century-a pattern we still see today, but with the added awesome threat of total annihilation in nuclear war. This was a pattern that Mannheim had already discerned in the buildups that had led to World War I. It was a war no one wanted, but once a minor crisis in the Balkans in 1914 set the machines in motion, there was no way to hold back mobilization and countermobilization. until the entire world had escalated into an extremely destructive war. Mannheim asserted that the same process held in the civilian sphere as well. The formal rationality of capitalism in the search of profits nevertheless led to no one looking out for the substantial rationality of the whole economic system. Rationality on one level coincided with irrationality on another level, precipitating an economic depression that could not be controlled. Mannheim argued that Fascism -- an antimodernist and antirational. ideology -- was, thus, not merely a bizarre aberration, but a reaction to the deeper lack of rationality in the world of impersonal modern organizations. Fascism asserted the power of the human leader -- exalting a Hitler or a Mussolini-as an antidote to the faceless efficiencies and larger irrationalities of the bureaucrats.

Hans Gerth, a student at Frankfurt, brought Mannheim's message to America. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, he collaborated with the young C. Wright Mills in a series of books. They attempted to synthesize Freud (an approach the Frankfurt Marxists were using) as well as George Herbert Mead with Weber in their Character and Social Structure. In 1946, they brought out the most influential collection of

-95-

Weber's writings, the famous Gerth and Mills edition, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. This brought attention to Weber's stratification theory under the title of "Class, Status, and Party" as well as to his theory of bureaucracy. In general Gerth and Mills stressed Weber as a conflict theorist, counteracting the image given by the earlier translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism brought out by Talcott Parsons. Over the next 20 years, a struggle went on over which side would appropriate and define the meaning of Weber for American sociology. Parsons and his collaborators brought out Weber's abstract definitions of capitalism (which stressed its rationality) and then his writings on law and on religion, whereas Gerth and his colleagues countered this idealist image of Weber by bringing out his more fully rounded historical studies.

During the 1950s, the conservative mood dominated American sociology. Talcott Parsons and other functionalists produced abstract categorizations of social institutions, everywhere finding a benign function contributing to maintaining the social order. Conflict sociology was not dead, but it was scarcely noticed. It was, however, making progress on the empirical front, racking up studies of power politics in organizations and charting the realities of stratification. Virtually the only loud voice upholding the insights of the conflict tradition was C. Wright Mills. These were the days of rabid anticommunism in. American politics, led by right-wing witch-hunters such as Senator Joe McCarthy, but the mood in a less extreme form was shared by virtually everyone. Liberal academics were afraid to use the word "Marx" in public, and they denounced anyone who had a critical stance lest they themselves arouse the ire of the rightwingers, whom most people felt could easily turn into Nazis. Thus, Mills acquired a reputation for being an extreme leftist. It was not quite accurate. C. Wright Mills was simply an individual of considerable personal courage who wrote clearly and did not mind being a minority because of his sharp criticism of the prevailing trends of his discipline.

Mills's theory was actually an application of that of Mannheim and, hence, of Weber. His most famous book, The Power Elite ( 1956), argued that America was not under the control of

-96-

individual decision makers -- that is, elected officials -- but was actually controlled by three massive, bureaucratic organizations. These were the corporate business establishment, the military bureaucracy of the Pentagon, and the bureaucrats of the federal government. One can see the Weberian theme: Marx's capitalists are there, but they are only one part of a larger concatenation of power groups, in which the state ( Weber's realm of "party," "the dwellers in the house of power") is importantly represented. Mills also discusses the elite status groups, "high society" and the Hollywood-style celebrities, though he claims that these are more of an offshoot or camouflage for the real power centers. The key point is a variant on Mannheim's: the policy of the United States at the highest level is not really set by any substantively rational, thinking human being and the voters do not exercise control through the mechanisms of democracy. The real forces in control are the huge bureaucracies, following their own logic of self-aggrandizement. Mills argued that the short-run self-interest of the capitalist establishment had become meshed with the interest of the Pentagon bureaucrats in expanding the military arms race. The flow of elite personnel back and forth between top positions in corporate business, the military, and the top federal bureaucracy cemented this structural convergence. All three sectors were drifting out of control and in the same direction. Mills feared it was leading directly towards World War III.

For decades a good deal of what Mills pointed out remained equally true and equally frightening. The personnel of presidents, generals, and cabinet officials changed, but most administrations, both Republican and Democrat, seemed equally unable to disengage themselves from the drift of the war machine. Nevertheless we have learned about some countervailing forces. The machine drifts out of control but that is only one tendency among several. Wars and nuclear confrontations have happened, but we have not yet entirely gone over the brink. One of these countervailing forces was pointed out by a theorist we have noticed earlier. James O'Connor pointed out that the modern state has undergone a fiscal crisis, which is due in part to the economic strains of the same military-industrial complex that Mills talked about. It is

-97-

true that to some extent the military arms buildup spurs the capitalist economy, but this is more important at some times than at others. It also contributes to burgeoning government costs; hence, periodically we become involved in efforts to adjust to the economic strain by cutting back.

Another shortcoming of Mills's viewpoint is that it considered the United States in isolation, as one capitalist/bureaucratic complex in itself. We have subsequently begun to pay more attention to the larger world system and to discover some of the laws by which it operates. There is a larger geopohtics of military expansion and contraction, involving all states and not fueled merely by one of them. Various aspects of geopolitical theory were put forward by Arthur Stinchcombe, Kenneth Boulding, the world historian William McNeill, and others. In the late 1970s, I put together a synthetic theory that fitted well to the patterns of expansion and contraction of states over the past several millenia. Big, resource-rich states tend to expand at the expense of smaller and poorer states. A second principle is that marchland states, those off "on the edge" of the populated area, tend to expand at the expense of those in middle, which face enemies on several sides. Both of these principles are cumulative over time; the big get bigger, the marchlands eat up the middle states. This would lead to one huge state eventually ruling the world, except that there are two further principles that intervene. One is that states on opposite sides of the world-system (say Russia coming from one direction, the United States coming from the other) eventually meet as two giant empires or alliances facing each other in a showdown for world domination. The other principle is that even without opposition from another super-power, states tend to break apart if they overextend themselves; when the outer borders of their empire are too far from home, the costs of empire start to make a state go bankrupt, and hence become susceptible to a rapid breakup when a crisis point is reached.

In the early 1980s, I applied these principles to the nuclear arms race which Mills had said was inevitable, and came to an unexpected conclusion. Geopolitically, the Soviet Union, which had inherited the position of the old Russian Empire, had lost all its geopolitical advantages by the mid-twentieth century; all pre-

-98-

dictive factors indicated that it would break apart. The big danger was, would it break up before a showdown war took place with the other great power, the United States, thereby destroying the world in nuclear war? During the 1980s both trends were apparent: increasing economic strains in the USSR, leading to a reform movement that tried to scale down the costs of military overextension; and on the other hand, an escalating nuclear arms race in an atmosphere of showdown, which threatened to destroy both superpowers and take the rest of the earth down with them. Fortunately it turned out that the strains in the USSR brought about breakdown on that side, before the confrontation of the great power blocks came to its climax. Mills's theory turned out to have its limitations, but it was touch and go for a while.

Let us return for a moment to the development of the conflict sociology of organizations. Mannheim and Mills helped develop this by applying an aspect of Weber's theory of bureaucracy. For another important aspect, we need to go back to Weber's own day. One of Weber's protégés was a young Marxist socialist named Robert Michels. Because of his political beliefs, Michels was denied a position in the German academic world, although Weber crusaded on his behalf. But Michels was already turning cynical. He was thoroughly familiar with the Marxist party of his day, the Social Democrats with their elaborate bureaucracy based on trade unions and their officials. On this organization, Michels trained an eye opened by Weber's notion of political conflicts in their own right. He noted that leaders of an organization are locked in an implicit struggle for power with their own followers: inside every organization there is a kind of miniclass struggle. Just as the small upper class in the economic system is able to dominate the much larger but unmobilized lower classes, the organizational elite is able to get its way, though outnumbered, by its followers because it, too, is much better mobilized. The organization should be seen as a political environment in which internal power struggles are won by those who control the material means of administration. This is a development of the Marx/ Engels theory of political mobilization and of the means of mental production. The elite controls the organizational

-99-

machinery for intercommunicating among themselves and also for defining reality to its members. The members of the elite,' too, tend to identify the interests of the organization with their own career interests. Whatever makes the organization safe., secure, and wealthy, benefits its leaders, who thereby derive prominent and cushy jobs. This is another reason for the "organizational drift" that Mannheim discerned. Leaders become attached to the status quo; they compromise with their environment and do whatever they feel is necessary just to keep the organization surviving, no matter how far it takes the organization from the official ideals for which it was set up.

Michels' theory laid the basis for a series of empirical studies of organizations in the 1940s and 1950s. Philip Selznick showed how the same process of organizational "goal displacement" Michels had found in the German workers' party also existed it, the liberal bureaucracy of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, undermining its reform-minded goals in the interest of softening the opposition of local elites. Selznick also showed some further tactics in organizational power struggles: for example, the way dissenters can be co-opted by putting them in positions of formal power where they have no room to maneuver for their own ideals. In effect this is a mechanism whereby the organizational position itself brainwashes the opposition leaders. Other researchers like Alvin Gouldner dealt with the power conflicts of the "change of administration" among top executives; Melville Dalton revealed the techniques of power struggle at the level of middle managers and their efforts to control workers; and Michel Crozier, a French sociologist, pointed out the crucial weapon of control over areas of uncertainty as a key to victory in these power struggles. A host of other studies -- some coming not only from sociologists, but also from business schools or public administration -- filled in many facets of organizations.

By the 1960s, it was possible to synthesize a full-scale theory of how organizations operate. Amitai Etzioni, for example, used Weber's three dimensions of, class, status, and power, to show three alternative techniques of control. Each of these works best in a particular kind of technical environment; each

-100-

also gives rise to particular kinds of strategies of struggle between bosses and workers. Economic controls, essentially through the power of the paycheck, are most usable in organizations that have clearly measurable outputs by each worker, but such controls lead to the displacement of the workers' attention-from the quality of the work itself to a struggle over just how the output is measured. Sheer coercion as a form of control -- brute force and threat -- works best when it is easy to maintain surveillance over the workers; its drawback is that it is extremely alienating and results in workers who are brutalized and dull if they are not able to escape. Finally for tasks that require a great deal of initiative and judgment, Etzioni coined the term normative control." Here the management needs to manipulate status groups and their ideologies in order to get the tasks done: thus, the huge sector of professionalized and credentialiied organizations that exist wherever work becomes highly esoteric and technical.

Further developments in the theory of organizations reveal many of the principles by which they operate in different circumstances. We have fitted in the varieties of technology that make organizations different from one another, and recently we have begun to map out the principles of interorganizational relations as they form an environment, or competitive ecology, for each other. Organizations survive, grow, or are picked off, not merely because of their internal processes, but as part of a kind of local "world system" of the organizations around them. This is particularly apparent in the case of capitalist business organizations, but it applies to government, religious, and other kinds of organizations as well. This type of theory is still being developed. Harrison White theorizes that "markets" do not consist of competitors but of cliques of organizations that try to separate themselves into noncompetitive niches. This type of theory has the potential for overturning the whole conventional economic way of looking at the capitalist system. Through all this work, a guiding thread is an extension of the conflict sociology that grew up around the time of Weber. The struggle for domination does not go on merely among aggregate social classes, but takes place in organizations. This makes

-101-

the world of conflict more complex, as there are struggles among organizations, and within them as well. But the complexity is not a chaos. Organizational theory has shown, with considerable insight, how organizations create particular interest groups at the same time that the organizations themselves give these interest groups the weapons that bring about varying degrees of domination. Organization theory, when understood in its broadest context, is a key for, understanding the whole workings of society.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 948