ABSTRACT
The task with which I began this work was to conduct a critical analysis of recent European work on power in organization theory. The field seemed quite specific: ‘Europe’, ‘power’ and ‘organization theory’—three totalities among which one must constitute connections, ‘critically’. Yet to be ‘critical’ would immediately demand suspending one's reliance on such seemingly factitious entities as a socio-political and geographic area, a topic of discourse, and a means of organizing that discourse. By what criteria is one to isolate these phenomena? What is ‘European’? Is it the Europe of the Economic Community, NATO, the Cold War? Or is it an historical Europe, of the nineteenth century perhaps? And if so, does one include the Balkans and Russia? On geographical criteria, possibly. But what weight do we attach to geographical criteria when we are dealing with intellectual formations? Perhaps ‘Europe’ refers not to a geographical area at all, but to a political and cultural division of the universe. So we might be tempted to regard it as a metaphor for a definite social formation—the area of Europe not under Soviet hegemony. But this might be more accurately regarded, on closer inspection, as a social formation only by pressure of externally conceived forces; it may have no valid unity of its own in anything other than the most expedient and frail terms.
