Ontology-OrganizationasWorld-Making-Final-24-10-01

The establishment of the World Standard Time over a century ago epitomises a form of relentless social ordering that has had an incalculable impact on our everyday life and on our unders

ONTOLOGY: ORGANISATION AS 'WORLD-MAKING'

Chapter Contribution to

Point/Counterpoint: Central Debates in Organisation Theory

Edited by

Robert Westwood and Stewart Clegg

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers

Robert Chia

Dept of Management, School of Business and Economics

University of Exeter

Streatham Court, Rennes Drive

Exeter EX4 4PU

Email: R.Chia@exeter.ac.uk

Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the foundational roots of modern attitudes towards organisation and management and to relocate their origins in the broader civilisational processes that have taken place especially in the last three millennium Its central argument is that organisation must not be understood as a concrete social entity (whether socially-constructed or otherwise) with durable characteristics and tendencies Instead, organisation is better understood as the aggregative unintended outcome of local efforts at ordering and regularising our otherwise intractable and amorphous life-world in order to make it more predictable and liveable Organisation

is more a tedious and interminable process of factioning out the real than a solid,

static thing This suggests that we ought to think about Organisation Studies (OS) not as the study of 'organisations', but as a sustained analysis of the generic

organisational impulses shaping contemporary modes of analysis, codes of

behaviour, social mannerisms, dress, gestures, postures, the rules of law, disciplines

of knowledge and so on These micro-ordering processes collectively serve to shape our identities and aspirations and to orient us towards ourselves and our

environment This has profound consequences for what we take as the legitimate objects of analysis, our modes of theorising and the imperatives we draw to inform managerial action It is this broader dimension of organising as 'world-making' which offers a richer alternative to the study of organisation and its consequences for the world of affairs

Introduction

'In each period there is a general form of the forms of thought; and, like the air we breath, such a form is so translucent, and so pervading, and so

seemingly necessary, that only by extreme effort can we become aware of it'

(A N Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933: 20)

In 1884, more than a hundred years ago, representatives from twenty-five major countries convened at the Prime Meridian Conference in Washington and came to an agreement on the exact length of the universal day They then proceeded to divide the earth into twenty-four time zones each one hour apart with Greenwich as the zero meridian Prior to this momentous event a traveller from Washington to San Francisco would have had to reset his watch more than two hundred times as he passed through each of the towns on the way to his destination The pressure for adopting standard time zones thus came initially from the railroad companies but was gradually taken up across the world so that by the early part of the twentieth century most countries had aligned itself with Greenwich time Crucially, it was the invention of first the telephone and then the wireless telegraph which made it

possible for simultaneous events taking place in various parts of the world to be registered, coordinated and synchronised according to this universal standard time The ability to experience distant events simultaneously, made possible by the

wireless and dramatized by the sinking of the Titanic on the night of 14th April 1912, was a part of the major cultural shift taking place during that period This expandingexperience of simultaneity and presence was further reinforced by concerted

attempts to standardise the previously agreed time zones across the world The globalization of time occurred on July 1st 1913 At 10 o'clock that morning the Eiffel Tower in Paris transmitted the first time signals around the world thereby registering

the advent of a universal framework for temporal coordination and control

Whatever sentiment and charm local time might have once meant the world was henceforth fated to wake up with buzzers and bells triggered by impulses that

travelled around the world with the speed of light This representation of private lived time and its systematic conversion into public ‘spatialised’ domains marked a crucial moment in the shaping of the modern world order In one single stroke it became possible to coordinate actions, intentions and aspirations across space in an unprecedented way and to achieve a level of predictability and productivity in socialinteractions never before envisaged This is a triumph of modern organisation It provides an important illustation of how an otherwise dispersed and heterogeneous concatenation of atomic event-occurrences spread out across a vast geographical space can be regularised and made to fit within a singular coordinated framework with highly productive consequences Such is the scope and power of the

phenomenon of organisation

The establishment of the World Standard Time over a century ago epitomises

a form of relentless social ordering that has had an incalculable impact on our

everyday life and on our understanding of social reality Like the invention of the alphabet and the printing press, several centuries before, it represents yet another momentous attempt to forge a universal system of communication and organisation out of an otherwise inchoate and amorphous mass of local orderings and tacit

understandings in the conduct of daily life Organisation is the quintessential

technology for real-ising the real: for making what appears initially irrelevant and

unconnected part of a universal order that gives sense and consequence to our everyday action and experience Oxford university, quarks, blackholes and gravity are real to us in our common-sense understanding, not because we can see or

experience them, but because we are able to attribute causal consequence to their

purported existence The construction of identities, their simple location, and their

causal attribution, however, are precisely modern strategies of organisation: central

features of our modern will-to-order They reflect our capacity for 'world-making': for drawing together the seemingly dispersed and the unrelated into a coherent and plausible system of explanation

Such forms of social ordering inevitably influence, amongst other things, how the flux and flow of our life-worlds are structured and conceptualized into events, things and situations; how identity is established and social entities created;

how taxonomies and systems of classifications are produced and with what effects; how reification takes place and causal relations imputed and with what

consequences; and how symbols and representations are used to substitute for realityand with what outcomes, particularly in terms of organisational priorities and

practices It is this second-order concern with the organisation of our forms of social life, our ways of seeing, our modes of understanding and explanation, and our

methods of knowledge-creation that constitutes an alternative way of conceptualising the role of Organisation Studies One that invariably emphasises the reality-

constituting or ontological character of organisation What is significantly

overlooked in much of conventional OS, therefore, is a rigorous and critical

reflection on the underlying social, cultural and historical forces shaping the way wesee, think and act within the institutionalised and organised structures of the modern world Against the restricted and restrictive view of OS as an economic-

administrative discipline, an expanded Social Theory of Organisation seeks to

critically examine the generic organising logic underpinning the societal and

institutional strategies of rationalization that both Max Weber and Michel Foucault, amongst others, identified as the defining feature of modernity

This chapter begins by examining the structuring effects of language on our perception and conception of reality It attempts to show how language, and in particular the alphabetic system of writing, has substantially inspired an atomistic, entitative and causal view of reality This view of reality was reinforced by the arrival of a typographic system of thinking some five hundred years ago following the invention of the printing press It is argued here that the introduction of such a typographic mindset led to the modern obsession with collecting, classifying and

typologising natural and social phenomena precipitating the kind of systematic empiricism that we now associate with scientific realism We then move on to briefly examine an alternative becoming ontology as the basis for reconceptualising

organisation as an emergent process rather than as a stable phenomenon From this

alternative metaphysical orientation, it will be shown that organisation involves the relentless arresting, fixing and stabilsiing of an intrinsically wild, fluxing and changeable reality 'Organisations' are, in fact, islands of relatively stabilised patterns

of interactional order selectively abstracted from a sea of chaos They do not possess'thing-like' characteristics We do not directly experience ‘an organisation’ even if

we are admittedly affected by the complex of social relationships we find ourselves

in at various points in our lives Such organising relationships are nothing more than the dynamic network of implicit assumptions, expectations, social obligations, rules, conventions and protocols which shape how our individual identities are constructedand how as fundamentally social creatures we are expected to behave and act within

a specific community at a given point in time Organisation, as such, is not so much

a solid, stable entity as it is an ongoing 'world-making' activity This activity of constructing and reinforcing our all-too-familiar organised world is intrinsic to the process of modern civilisation It goes far back to the invention of writing and, in particular, the invention of the alphabet

The Alphabetization of the Western World

'If today we are so often tempted to speak of the "European mind" or the

"Western mind", vague as these determinations are, they have a factual basis insofar as we mean those cultures which have continued to employ the Greekinvention'

(E Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, 1982: 346)

Any understanding of Western cultural evolution and change is impossible without aprior appreciation of the fundamental changes in sense-ratios, and hence attitudes of

observational discrimination, brought about by the invention of the alphabet

Introduced some three thousand years ago by the Phoenicians and appropriated and modified by the Greeks some three centuries later, alphabetic writing paved the way for the de-tribalizing of ancient Greece and its subsequent rise into prominence in thefirst millennium BC Through the newly-systematized alphabetic script, the Greeks created, from the fifth and fourth century BC, one of the richest literatures of all times, including poetry, drama, epics, history and philosophy The advantage of the alphabetic system over previous forms of scribal writing lay in its startling economy and flexibility of use in communication: as an achievement it has often been

compared to the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the horse

(McArthur, 1986) As a number of influential studies show (Gelb, 1952; Diringer, 1962; Ong 1967, 1977, 1982; Havelock, 1982), the alphabetic system of writing dramatically altered the character of the pre-literate Greek culture that had existed

up to that period Ong (1982), for instance argues that the shift from oral to literate alphabetic culture did more than change patterns of art, politics and commerce It

facilitated a profound shift in human consciousness bringing about the linear,

abstract form of Western logic that we take very much for granted today This 'ABCDEmindedness' brought about by the introduction of the alphabet, creates a kind of chirographic bias that subtly ranks sight above sound and the eye above the ear Knowing became inextricably linked to vision and it led Aristotle to

subsequently write in the very first few lines of his Metaphsics: 'Of all the senses,

sight best brings about knowledge of things and reveals many distinctions'

(Aristotle, in Treddenick, 1933: 1) Moreover, thinking came to be intimately

associated with visual metaphors: 'observation' privileges visual data; 'phenomenon' owes its origin in Greek to the notion of 'exposure to sight'; 'definition' comes from 'definire', to draw a line around; and sight is internalised into our vocaublary of knowledge - insight, idea, illuminate, enlighten, reflect, survey, perspectiv, point of view, show, overview etc

This shift in the balance of the senses away from the aural to the visual also favoured 'a new kind of personality structure' (Ong, 1967: 8) because, as McLuhan and McLuhan (1988) convincingly argued, prolonged mimesis of the alphabet

produced a dominant mode of perception which elevated the individual, the abstract and the static as the basis of analysis The phonetic alphabet first translates images into arbitrary consonants and sound syllables which, by themselves, are meaningless.These are then mentally reassembled back into the form of words from which

meaning is then extracted Meaning, therefore, only becomes possible at the

operative level of words and not at the level of the individual alphabet Literacy training systematically develops the ability to construct meaningful frames out of otherwise meaningless consonants and sound syllables As McLuhan astutely

observed, it is through 'the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound (that)

we have built the shape and meaning of Western man' (McLuhan, 1967: 50) Hence, the Greeks did not just invent an alphabet, 'they invented literacy and the literate basis of modern thought' (Havelock, 1982: 82) The alphabetic culture puts a

premium on sharp outlines and clear-cut sequences and therefore promotes 'literal meaning….as something altogether wholesome and altogether desirable' whilst at thesame time regarding 'other…more profoundly symbolic meaning with disfavor' (Ong, 1967: 47) The introduction of the alphabetic system made available a

permanent visualized record in place of an acoustic one thereby displacing the need for memory, repetition and copiousness in speech performances

However, not all systems of writing invented has had this effect Ong

maintains that unlike Chinese writing, which does not at root work from words as sound, the alphabetic system works by 'atomizing' linguistic sound, and in particular the syllable, into its acoustic components and then assigning a specific alphabetic shape to each of these sound elements This breakthrough in streamlining an

otherwise cumbersome assortment of signs and symbols gave language an overall orderly shape and made it much more manageable than ever before Instead of having to deal with the hundreds of distinct pictograms (picture signs), ideograms (idea signs) and logograms (word signs) that are to be found in cuniform,

hieroglyphics or Chinese writing, between twenty and thirty quasi-phonetic symbols can now be used to portray an infinity of words and hence afford a much wider variety of expressions Moreover, it enabled literacy to spread faster because this method of atomizing linguistic sound 'placed the skill for reading theoretically within the reach of children at the stage where they are still learning the sounds of their own vocabulary' (Havelock, 1982: 83)

One unexpected consequence of the introduction of the alphabetic system

was the popularising of the method of atomization - the breaking up sound into

component elements and then reassembling them in space to form meaningful words.This brought with it an overwhelming sense of order and control that had never beenbefore experienced Thus, 'When the alphabet commits the verbal and conceptual worlds….to the quiescent and obedient order of space, it imputes to language and thought an additional consistency of which preliterate persons have no inkling' (Ong,1967: 45) Ong therefore concludes that it is no accident that 'formal logic was invented in an alphabetic culture' (Ong, 1967: 45) It is this formal logic of analysis associated with alphabetization which eventually led to the almost obsessive fixing, naming, classifying and thematizing of material and social phenomena as a way of creating order and predictability in an otherwise fluxing and amorphous life-world

Writing, in general and alphabetic writing in particular, is inextricably linked

to the systematic ordering and organisation of society Thus, ‘Communities

developed ranks, casts and guilds, armies their divisions, priesthoods their

hierarchies, merchants their inventories and farmers their fields and boundaries’ (McArthur, 1986: 32) As Goody (1986) perceptively points out, modern nations are highly dependent on writing for their legislatures and for their systems of

governance For Goody,‘the desk and the bureau’ (p 90) are critical to Weber’s

concept of bureaucracy Likewise Green (1981) argues that the emergence of scaled, centralized bureaucratic institutions is a consequence of the rise of writing which 'enabled the administration to grow and, through written liability, to maintain direct authority over even the lowest levels of personnel and clientele' (Green, 1981: 367)

large-In sum, the alphabet is, as McLuhan (1967) puts it, ‘an aggressive and

militant absorber and transformer of cultures’ (p 48) It precipitated the abstraction, simple-location1, and objectification of phenomena for the purpose of analysis, and

by reducing all our senses into visual and pictorial or enclosed space, precipitated the rise of the Euclidean sensibility which has dominated our thought processes for over two thousand years The alphabetization of the Western world, and the method

of atomization it introduced, constitutes the most successful and widespread

approach to organising, structuring and representing the aural-oral world of lived experience in a way that readily lends itself to cognitive manipulation In this most fundamental sense the alphabetization of the Western world is a prime example of organisation as a 'world-making' activity With its introduction, came an entirely newemphasis on visual control and organisation and the reliance on atomization as a generic method of analysis

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Rise of Typographic Thinking

'Print gave the drive to collect and classify…Getting together an assemblage

of snippets on classified subjects culled from any and every writer now paid

a thousandfold'

(W Ong, The Presence of the Word, 1967: 85)

Nearly two and a half millennia after the invention of the alphabet, in around the year 1447, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz became the first in the West to mechanize printing Initially, printing appeared to complement manuscript writing which was much in demand by the upper and middle classes and which the monastic scribes became increasingly unable to cope with Soon, however, like the cottage industries

of more recent times, the slow and laborious process of producing the written word

1 The term ‘simple-location’ is used here to reflect the widespread rational belief that our

phenomenal experiences, including our physical sensations can be fixed spatially and hence

systematically differentiated from other phenomenal experiences In this way it becomes possible to locate the symptom felt and thus deal with it in a manner reminiscent of the way a doctor diagnoses ailments by establishing the part of the anatomy associated with the symptom and then dealing with

it accordingly

gave way to printing This marked another significant moment in the modification ofthe visual/tactile/aural sense-ratios that had first been first rendered apart by the introduction of the alphabet For whilst manuscript culture is effectively

conversational in that ‘the writer and his audience are physically related by the form

of publication' (McLuhan, 1967: 84) since each manuscript produced was

commissioned by the instructions of a specific individual, the print culture created the distinction between authors and the consuming public Henceforth, multiple copies of a manuscript could be made and distributed widely so much so that it was very likely the readership may never have met the author of a particular piece of

work Conversational exchange gave way to the commodification of output The

invention of typography ‘extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production’ (McLuhan, 1967: 124) Typography as the first mechanized handicraft radically shaped not only private sense-ratios but also the prevailing

‘patterns of communal interdependence’ (McLuhan, 1967: 164) Uniform

quantification, assembly, measurability, individualism, and centralized control became important priorities in the management of economic and social life

Uniform quantification because print made it possible to produce almost identical copies in increasingly larger quantities And this, in turn, generated a larger appetite for more of the same For the first time ever, assembly and mass-production,

as we understand it today, became possible Print, in facilitating the translation of thevernacular into a mass media, initiated the demand for uniformity and

standardization and hence inspired the homogenizing forces of modernity But it alsopromoted a widespread type-setting mode of thought through its emphasis on

combining and recombining the otherwise discrete and infinitely-manipulable

individual characters of the alphabet As Ong (1967) writes:

'What was crucial for the ultimate locking of sound in space was the

invention of the movable alphabetic typecast from matrices which had been made with punches…Some twelve to sixteen steps…intervened here betweenthe written word (already one remove from the spoken) and the printed sheet…To perform them, knowledge of the language concerned is not

necessary…The commitment of spoken words to space here in typography has a depth and intensity continuous with but far exceeding that achieved by alphabetic chirography…What happened with the emergence of alphabetic typography was not that man discovered the use of his eyes but that he began

to link visual perception to verbalization to a degree previously unknown' (Ong, 1967: 48-50)

The idea that any phenomenon, material or social, can be capture and represented by firstly breaking it up into individual component pieces and then reassembled as needs be, first initiated by the invention of the alphabet but enormously magnified bythe advent of typoography, became the dominant metaphor for analysis It is this typographic metaphor which serves as the leitmotif for modernist thought.

Centralized control and a linear, hierarchical order were also accentuated through the print culture because the latter provided possibly the first truly

economical means to significantly overcome the hitherto troublesome limitations of space and time in terms of communication and influence For print made it possible

to achieve widespread communication at a distance and across time for the masses to

be reached directly thereby influencing their attitudes, cultural habits and lifestyles

It is this principle of extension and intensification of communicational channels which made possible the kind of large-scaled, centralized and bureaucratic

institutions that Green (1981) referred to in his perceptive analysis of the

organisation of society Without the written word, communication would have had to

be passed on ‘by word of mouth’ thereby incurring inevitable distortions Without the alphabetic system the range of abstract meanings, perspectives, concepts and ideas would have remained very limited or else evolved at a much slower pace than that achieved through the advent of literacy Without the printed word,

communication would have been restricted only to the privileged few and not to the critical masses required to produce revolutionary changes in the priorities and mindsets that paved the way for the Enlightenment to take place The dramatic transformations and breakthroughs achieved in the West over the last five hundred years especially would not have been possible

Key Axioms of Modern Rationality

'Industrial society rests on order Order means everything in its place…a society bent on order should put the body into order by putting order into the body; society gains order by "training"'

(R Schoenwald, 'Training Urban Man', 1973: 674)The Enlightenment was a historical watershed because of the emphasis it gave to four key ideational imperatives that were inspired by the advent of literacy and

rediscovered by the invention of the printing press These continue to underpin many

of the assumptions made in contemporary organisational theorising Firstly, there is

the unquestioned commitment to a Parmenidean-inspired being ontology whereby

reality is conceived as atomistic, thing-like, already-formed and essentially

unchanging It does not take much to see that the spread of the use of the alphabetic system in Greece conicided with the rise of this form of atomistic thinking beginningespecially with Parmenides in the fifth century B.C and subsequently modified by his successors Leucippus and Democritus As Aristotle wrote of Democritus:

Democritus gives to space the name "void", "no-thing", and "the infinite" To each of his substances he gives the name "thing", and "the compact", and

"being" He supposes them to be so small that they elude our senses; but they have forms of all sorts and shapes of all sorts and differ in size So that already he is able to create from these, as elements, by aggregation, the

masses that are perceptible to sight' (Aristotle, On Democritus, in Mansley

Robinson, 1968: 197)

Reality, according to Democritus, consisted fundamentally of atomistic elements which when aggregated produced the visible masses that we find all around us Thus, just like written words are aggregates of individual letters so also the world is

an aggregate of irreducible atomic elements

This way of thinking about reality was significantly revived by the invention

of the printing press because it promoted a heightened awareness of the aggregative nature of words and hence of the thought processes associated with them Such an intellectual orientation gave rise to a form of 'atomistic rationalism' whereby

individual agents are construed as the ultimate unit of social reality and hence the most appropriate unit of analysis Moreover, causal attribution became a prominent preoccupation of rational analysis because if reality is discrete and reducible to its aggregate components, it becomes possible to separate cause from effects and action from outcomes Thus, individual agents are held to be relatively autonomous units capable of exercising deliberate choice and intentional action in any given set of circumstance The result is that it is the individual's identity, cognition, actions, intentions, and capabilities that form the primary basis for description, classification and analysis as well as causal attribution in social theorising This practice is also widespread in OS for, although it is sometimes conceded that organizations are indeed reifications and hence cannot 'have' competences, it is nevertheless taken that 'individuals' are unquestionably real and hence can 'have competences' Attributing

properties, capabilities and intentions to circumscribed individual actors presupposes

an atomistic view of social reality; a culturally-specified way of construing agency and action For only when this view is upheld can social phenomena be isolated, analysed and causally linked within a spatio-temporal framework of explanation

Modern Western rationality, therefore, is better understood as part of a more generic cognitive strategy for converting the otherwise intractable and mutable masses, material or otherwise, into useable resources by breaking them down and converting them into repeatable part elements The development of this approach was much inspired by the invention of the alphabet and the advent of typography as

we have tried to show Whitehead (1926/85: 60-64) maintains that without the development of this method of analysis, scientific development, as exemplified by the achivements of Galileo and Newton, would have been impossible

Secondly, with the Enlightenment came the revived emphasis on the

observation of both natural and social phenomena and their subsequent location and classification into typological schemas Vision and systematic observation became central to our forms of knowing Berger (1972) convincingly argues that the

Enlightenment systematically transformed our ways of seeing from one of involved engagement to that of passive objectification A 'logic of the gaze' began to dominatethought Bryson (1982) in a fascinating analysis of Western thought maintains that the modern 'look' plays a functional and placating role in empirical investigations It

is fixing, prolonged and contemplative It's aim is to arrest and extract form from fleeting process It is a vision disembodied, a vision decarnalised Thus, in the Gaze the observer: ‘arrests the flux of the phenomena, contemplates the visual field from avantage-point outside the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed presence’ (Bryson, 1982: 94) The Gaze is penetrating, piercing, fixing, objectifying

It is a violent act of forcibly and permanently ‘present-ing’ that which otherwise would be a fluxing, moving reality

With the Enlightenment and the rise into ascendence of a logic of the gaze came the overpowering need to scan, document, collect, classify and sort out objects

of interest, and to attribute causal powers to these artificially-isolated objects of analysis A culture of 'collecting and classifying' (Elsner and Cardinal, 1994)

emerged that was to produce hobbies and occupations such as the collection of stones, shells, butterflies, and plants, and modern institutions such as the museums and art galleries that make up an essential part of our contemporary cultural

landscape Through such careful observation and painstaking differentiation and classification of phenomena, it was believed that our knowledge of the universe could be systematically documented and the underlying natural order revealed

Classification tables of all sorts emerged during this period Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, written in the early eighteenth century provides one of the clearest

examples of this revived obsession with observing, collecting, listing and classifying empirical data It precipitated the emphasis on what we now call ‘systematic

empiricism’: the second ideational imperative associate with the advent of the Enlightenment

Initiated by Aristotle’s call for grounding our knowledge in observations and inspired by Descartes’ rigorously logical method of doubting, systematic empiricism surfaced most prominently in the kind of logical positivism which held sway in intellectual circles for the best part of the earlier half of the twentieth century It is within this theoretical soil, as Gergen and Thatchenkery (1998: 19) puts it, that contemporary management and organisational thinking took root

Thirdly, the triumph of Enlightenment knowledge brought with it the idea that language was primarily a medium designed to enable us to accurately represent linguistically our perceived reality This representationalist view of language derives from the Cartesian split between mind and matter The purpose of the Cartesian mind

is to mirror accurately the nature of matter existing external to itself Thus, cognition

in this Cartesian sense, involves the ability to accurately 'map' phenomena and events in the external world and to thereby establish their causal relationships in a rationalist system of explanation In Rorty’s (1980) terms the picture used to

ideologically captivate the Western world for over three centuries is the image of themind as a mirror, containing various linguistic representations of the world For Rorty, it is this representationalist world-view which has provided the fundamental premise for the legitimation of modern knowledge Knowledge is only deemed true and acceptable if it is able to accurately represent external reality as it is in itself Such a view implies that language is seen as merely a medium of communication and that it does not play an active and constitutive role in the production of social reality Moreover, linguistic terms are believed to have an essential one-to-one relationship with observed phenomena so much so that only literal meanings provide

a reliable basis for theory-building This belief about the transparency of language