ABSTRACT
In general, we could say of the usual treatment of people in organizations that it has been couched at the level of individuals and individualism (Champion, 1975, provides a good example). People in organizations have been regarded as psychologically determined entities whose needs and dispositions, subject to social qualification (hence social psychology), are the source of social action. As Poulantzas says in another, yet relevant, context:
This is a problematic of social actors, of individuals as the origin of social action: sociological research thus leads finally, not to the study of the objective co-ordinates that determine the distribution of agents into social classes and the contradictions between these classes, but to the search for finalist explanations founded on the motivations of conduct of the individual actors (Poulantzas, 1973, p. 295).
