ABSTRACT
Hitherto the stress has been on organizations as stable, external structural, systematic constraints. On occasion this has been breached by ‘action guided by images which transcend these constraints’ (Bauman, 1976, p. 2) as in Ordine Nuovo's workers' councils experience, but such breaches have not typically been a concern of organization theory. This is not to say that this theory has been wholly deterministic and structural, but it has been preponderantly so. We encounter this determinism in the earliest formal theories of administration, most notably in Taylorism. It is also present in the human relations emphasis on the constraining influence of ‘the human group’ (despite its stress on needs and sentiments), particularly in studies of the function of group norms in restricting workers' output. In Weber it is evident in his stress on necessity as the basis of social action:
To Weber the necessary was the condition of rationality. Indeed, rational action required unfreedom for it to be possible at all. It is the rules, which confront each individual cog in the bureaucratic machine with all the merciless, indomitable power of nature – the rules which make the external walls of the action safely and predictably stable – which render bureaucracy rational, which permit the bureaucrats carefully to select means for the ends, secure in the knowledge that the means will indeed bring forth the objectives they wish, or are told, to achieve. The rational action commences when the rules are ‘already there’; it does not account for the origins of rules, explain why rules remain strong, or why they take on the shape they possess. The question of the origins of rules, of the origins of the environmental necessity of bureaucratic action, cannot be phrased in the language of rationality (Bauman, 1976, p. 4).
