Introduction

This book is concerned with some of the key factors that will determine current and future European competitiveness. Key issues in understanding current and future competitiveness are the nature of and trends in internationalisation, and the likely effects of European integration on firm and country structure and performance. In this volume we analyse the experience of firms and countries in order to throw some light on these processes.

Competitiveness is a concept that is widely but not consistently used and that can be analysed at various levels – by groups of countries, country, industry, and firm. Two broad attitudes to competitiveness can be distinguished. The first is that competitiveness is a question of relative efficiency, whether dynamic or static. This can be measured by looking at relative performance levels – productivity and productivity growth, for example. The second is that competitiveness is reflected in relative international trade performance – whether measured as shares of world export markets, the degree of import penetration or an index of revealed comparative advantage. These two broad concepts of competitiveness may coincide but need not. Thus, the country with the highest level of productivity may not have the highest trade share. If trade shares depend on strategic competition in world markets, then they will be determined by a mixture of efficiency and market power considerations.

In looking at Europe, we use both these concepts of competitiveness, recognising that a complex combination of efficiency and strategic factors determine final outcomes.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the ‘crisis’ model of social science and to show how it is used to explain intellectual divisions in both sociology and organization theory.

We argue that the power of systems analysis has diminished as new paradigms for sociology and organization theory have emerged. To support this, we describe the conceptual and methodological limitations of structural-functionalism and social systems theory. These limitations both explain the decline of functionalism as a dominant paradigm and provide analytical openings for the development of new sociological methods.

Elaborating upon this argument, we suggest that a Kuhnian (Kuhn 1962, 1970a) revolution swept across Western sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that this found expression in organization theory during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a result, the development of new schemes for analysing society was replicated in the study of organizations, this trend representing a move towards paradigm heterodoxy. We document the growth of crisis theory and paradigmism in organization theory and discuss specific instances of use. In particular, we analyse a range of attempts to define the theory communities of social and organization theory as paradigm structures.

Introduction

In this chapter we trace the origins of functionalism and systems theory in social science. We illustrate how the social systems approach draws inspiration from writings which suggest conceptual parallels between societies and organisms. The way is prepared for a deconstruction of this approach by establishing the foundations upon which its mode of theorizing rests.

To achieve this, we first examine the work of some of the founding fathers of social science. The majority of the chapter is devoted to an appreciation of the influence of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim on the development of social systems thinking. We document how this influence is derived mainly from their writings on principles of positivism and evolution.

At the end of the chapter we suggest that these principles are translated into modern social science through the approach known as structural-functionalism. It was through developments in sociological functionalism that an ‘orthodoxy’ of systems analysis was established in organization theory.

Founding fathers of social science

Our account of sociological orthodoxy begins with the antecedents of sociological positivism. Although elements of a positivist heritage can be found in the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, we begin where for many sociology itself begins, with the writings of Auguste Comte (1798–1857).

Introduction

In this final chapter, we introduce a new paradigm for social and organization theory – postmodernism. We start by contrasting modern and postmodern forms of explanation, and explore a family of terms derived from these two generic concepts. In so doing, we consider whether postmodernism is better described as an ‘epoch’ or an ‘epistemology’, a distinction which underpins much current debate.

We then go on to assess the chief theoretical positions of modernism. Here we analyse the differences between ‘critical’ and ‘systemic’ modernism, and outline Habermas' well known ‘defence of modernity’. The section is completed by a review of different approaches to the modernist trajectory in organizational analysis.

Finally, through reference to the works of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard, we produce an inventory of post-modern concepts for social theory. When coupled with the distinction between epoch and epistemology, this inventory provides a framework for a nascent postmodern theory of organizations. A case study of a deconstructionist approach to organizational power is described.

Introduction

In the last chapter we noted how the literature of organization theory has been replete with assessments of its paradigmatic status. We have seen numerous works analysing the study of organizations by reference to alternatives to the dominant ‘functionalist’ paradigm. The identification of new paradigm candidates has for many signalled a state of crisis, the orthodoxy being undermined by ‘critics’ who claim to solve problems which proponents of a generic systems approach are incapable of solving, mainly concerning change and conflict. These developments, in what may be termed the ‘sociology of organization theory’, have been predicated on Thomas Kuhn's history of science, with elements from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions thesis being used to justify descriptions of community structure. Kuhn's seminal concept of ‘paradigm’ has been the medium for depicting the development progress of organizational theory as ‘poly-paradigmatic’ (Lammers 1974).

However, despite the wealth of material generated by this process, the philosophy on which this style of analysis is based, ‘conventionalism’ (see Kuhn 1962, Hanson 1958, Feyerabend 1970a), has all too frequently been used in a superficial way.

Introduction

Pondy and Boje (1981) suggested that ‘organization theory is faced with a frontier problem … how to conduct inquiry based on several paradigms’ (p. 84). A few years later, Donaldson commented ‘it is easy to write of the virtues of multi-level analysis … It is quite another thing to do this in practice’ (1985, pp. 284-5). In this chapter, we take up the challenge of employing a range of paradigms within one research investigation. Specifically, we develop a multiple paradigm study of work organization.

The chapter outlines a research programme in which the multiple paradigm model of Burrell and Morgan (1979) was used to conduct an empirical analysis of work behaviour in the British Fire Service. Insight into the organization was gained through using the four Burrell and Morgan paradigms as empirical frames of reference. Results were obtained through using a theory and method from each paradigm as the basis for research. Details of the fieldwork are given, research findings are presented, and the validity of the method is discussed.

Introduction

Having described how functionalism in social science has its roots in the writings of Comte, Mill, Spencer and Durkheim, we now illustrate how this approach offers a basis for characterizing organizations as ‘open systems’.

We start by noting how functionalist thinking became influential in anthropology and sociology. Thereafter we describe how sociological functionalism was joined with general-systems theory to form a generic systems model for organizational analysis. Finally, we argue that the systems approach attained an intellectual hegemony in organizational theory for almost half a century, mainly through professing a prior claim to empirical explanation.

From this analysis, we see how the systems metaphor underpins the human relations, socio-technical and contingency theories of organization, and informs popular textbooks on business and management.

Functionalism in social science

We have outlined the contributions made to functionalist sociology by the founding fathers of social science. We note, however, that none of them uses the term ‘functionalist’ to characterize the philosophy of their own work. Instead the origins of an explicitly functionalist approach to social science lie in anthropology, and particularly in the works of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.

Since the early 1970s, there have been numerous attempts to define the professional community structure of social science. Writers have catalogued a range of alternatives to the apparently declining but still dominant theoretical paradigm of structural-functionalism. The process of specifying new paradigms has been predicated mainly on Thomas Kuhn's (1962) work in the history of science, in which he distinguishes between periods of ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ activity. In line with Kuhn's thinking, sociologists have argued that the emergence of new influential perspectives signals sociology is currently experiencing a period of scientific revolution, or ‘science-in-crisis’.

The book examines this ‘crisis’ thesis as it applies to the branch of sociology concerned with organizations. We trace the history of the influential systems-theory approach to organizational analysis from its origins in positivist and evolutionary philosophy, through its development under sociological functionalism, to its deconstruction by radical structuralists and postmodernists. In highlighting the often acrimonious debate between the systems theorists and the critics of organization theory, we offer support for the crisis theory perspective.

This position, however, cannot be given unqualified support. In particular, we question its contention that paradigms are ‘incommensurable’. Rather than advocate the hermetic sealing of systems theory or other discourses, we suggest that – as paradigms – they are ultimately pervious phenomena. We argue that seemingly incommensurable theoretical positions can be mediated, notably through recourse to language-game philosophy.