ABSTRACT
It is in this changing global context of competition and innovation that those managing work organisations struggle to control work activities and arrangements in such a way that the corporations employing them continue in existence. And ‘struggle’ is indeed the appropriate word to use here. In their case studies of seven employing organisations, Beynon and his colleagues (2002) show that the managers implementing changes neither had a clear sense of direction about the changes they were bringing about nor a ready capacity to ‘meet their desired ends’. They were, rather, ‘buffeted this way and that, dealing with uncertainty and risk by displacing it down the organisation – most normally through adjustment of employment policies’. Managers are working day-to-day in a context where the survival of the organisation, whether it be a profit-oriented business corporation or a state welfare agency, can never be taken for granted. This stress on organisational survival has been increasingly recognised by organisation theorists. One way in which this has been done has been to see the relationships between organisations and their ‘environment’ as a matter of natural selection: a fight for survival within the ecological system of which they are a part. This line is taken as part of the population ecology approach to organisational analysis (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Morgan 1990). Here, organisations are seen as adapting and evolving in order to survive within the organisational population of which they are a part. They go through both planned and unplanned ‘variations’ in their form, and, largely through processes of competition, the environment ‘selects’ the form which best suits the organisation. Organisations then ‘retain’ the form which best suits their particular ‘niche’ or domain’, this retention process including all those normal organisational practices – from the use of operating manuals to socialisation activities – which organisations follow to maintain stability.
