Sensemaking in Organizations: 050917 Behind enemy lines
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in Everyday Life. NY: Doubleday Anchor. Front and
back regions, 111121:
Goffman’s argument (1959): the self is that collection of performances that take place in and across
specific locations.
Goffman suggests that when one’s activity occurs in the presence of others, some aspects of the
activity are expressively accentuated and other aspects, which might discredit the fostered impression,
are suppressed. Accentuated facts make their appearance front stage, and the suppressed facts back
stage.
Goffman makes an important distinction between front stage and back stage behaviour. As the
term/concept implies front stage actions are visible to the audience and are part of the performance.
Inopportune intrusions may occur, in which a back stage performance is interrupted by someone who
is not meant to see it.
Goffman defines front and back stage as:
front stage: where actions (in a general and fixed fashion) are visible to the audience and are
part of the individual’s performance;
back stage: where the performer can relax; he/she can drop his/her front, forgo speaking in
his/her lines, and step out of character.
During the front stage, the performer formally performs and adheres to conventions that have
meaning to the audience. It is a part of the performance that is consistent and contains generalized
ways to explain the situation or role the performer is playing to the audience that observes it. The
performer knows he or she is being watched and acts accordingly. This is a fixed presentation, e.g.
servers in a restaurant have to act much more proper and presentable in the dining room than they do
in the kitchen.
Back stage is where performers are present but audience is not, and the performers can step out of
character without fear of disrupting the performance. It is where facts suppressed in the front stage or
various kinds of informal actions may appear. The back stage is completely separate from the front
stage. No members of the audience can appear in the back.
Since the vital secrets of a ‘show’ are visible backstage and since performers behave out of character
while there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front to the back stage will be kept closed
to members of the audience and or that the entire back region will be kept hidden from them. This is a
widely practiced technique of impression management.
Impression management (Goffman, 1959): a process in which people attempt to influence the
perceptions of other people about a person, object or event.
Control of backstage plays a significant role in the process of ‘work control’, whereby individuals
attempt to buffer themselves from the deterministic demands that surround them.
Goffman’s “impression management”, “back stage regions” and “front stage regions” created an image
of organizations woven together through performances by organizational members. One of his
contributions is that although impression management is often viewed at the interpersonal level, it
also is a team phenomenon and thus has profound implications for understanding organizations.
Fournier, V., Grey, C. (2000). At the critical moment: Conditions and Prospects for Critical
Management Studies. Human Relations, 53 (1), 732:
The 1990’s: the emergence of a new conjunction in the terms ‘critical’ and ‘management’ and the birth
of a new discipline, called: critical management studies (CMS).
Critters: used to denote the people involved in critical management.
Since management emerged as a social practice in the 1800s and 1900s, it has been subject to
various sorts of criticism:
Early 1800s: criticism of deliberate fraud and incompetence;
, Early 1900s: management was seen as a servile occupation (dienend/ slaafs) and used
pejoratively (kleinerend).
In the early nineteens there was criticism of management based upon its role in discipline and control
of labour, however, it is only in the 1990s that any attempt has been made to unify the analysis by
drawing it together under one name: critical management studies (CMS).
Critical management studies (CMS): a loose but extensive grouping of theoretically informed
critiques of management, business and organization, grounded originally in a critical theory
perspective.
Although CMS emerged in the UK in the 1990s, we need to go back to the 1980s to understand it. In
the 1980s, under the influence of New Right politics, management became a hot topic and, according
to some commentators, a ‘second managerial revolution’ was effected. Management could always have
been read as political practice, rather than simply as a neutral set of administrative techniques, but
the status of management within the context of the New Right rendered this much more visible.
However, the relationship between management and the New Right was more complex. For, at the
same time as management became constituted as the solution to a range of problems and issues, it
also itself became a problem.
Since the Japanization, management knowledge and science was more often appeared as fragmented
and unstable.
However, management’s lack of scientific status has probably been more problematic for academics
than for managers, since CMS is, primarily, an academic phenomenon.
The study of management and organizations has drawn upon social science traditions, but with a
considerable timelag. Qualitative methods have only fairly recently gained attention, but there has
been a steady growth in the engagement with nonpositivist social science and postmodernism.
Positivism: The philosophy positivism is stating that knowledge is based on natural phenomena and
their properties and relations. Knowledge is gained from sensory experience and interpreted through
reason and logic.
While positivist methodologies saw society as given and man as mere part of it governed by its rules,
nonpositivists on the other hand considered man as independent thinking being who can influence
society also. They rejected the oversocialized conception of man. Nonpositivist methodologies, thus,
tried to gauge what goes inside mind of man and how it affects society.
Nonpositivism: Nonpositivism is a philosophy that studies the internal processes represented
through emotions, motives, aspirations and the individual’s interpretation of social reality. Non
positivists emphasized upon using qualitative methods and not scientific methods.
UK vs. US
The engagement with nonpositivism and the related moves towards CMS have been much more
strongly felt in the UK than in the US.
US sociology is dominated by positivistic methods;
UK management schools were more likely to be able to draw upon nonpositivistic social
science and methods.
Theoretical pluralism of CMS:
The theoretical pluralism of CMS and the fact that there is no unitary ‘critical’ position mean that
there is no single way of demarcating the critical from the noncritical. We use the term CMS in a
broad sense to encompass a plurality of conflicting intellectual traditions, including some authors who
would reject the CMS label. We suggest that the boundaries are drawn around issues related to:
Performativity
a) The boundary between work on management with performative intent and with a not
performative intent; the performative intent means the intent to develop knowledge
which contributes to the production of maximum output and minimum input –
efficiency.
, o noncritical management studies are governed by the principle of
performativity;
o CMS are not (per se) governed by performativity; CMS questions the alignment
between a) knowledge, b) truth and c) efficiency and is concerned with
performativity only in that it seeks to uncover what is being done in its name.
Example: gender issues, in noncritical studies the issue might be one of harnessing
diversity in the pursuit of effectiveness. CMS may concentrate on the making of gender
differences and the ways in which organization practices, including equality, are
implicated in the reproduction of gendered power relations.
Denaturalization
a) We can see CMS as being engaged of deconstructing the ‘reality’ of organizational life
by exposing its ‘unnaturalness’ or irrationality.
b) CMS is about denaturalization and about uncovering the alternatives that have been
effaced by management knowledge and practice. It is concerned with the proposition
that things may not be as they appear.
Reflexivity
a) CMS involves perpetual critique, including a critique on itself implied by its emphasis
on reflexivity.
There is a debate going on about how CMS could be recognized.
There are two conflicting positions:
CMS as means to transform management;
a) CMS as contribution to the promotion and development of more humane, ethically
minded forms of management;
b) CMS is not antimanagement, but rather aims to promote less irrational and socially
divisive forms of management theories and practices.
CMS as antimanagement;
a) more or less a complete disengagement with managerial practice;
b) management is seen as irredeemably corrupt since its activity is inscribed within
performative principles which CMS seeks to challenge.
c) CMS’s task is not to transform management, but to undermine it through critique.
Note: the CMS as antimanagement position identifies ‘management’ as united in a conspiracy against
the ‘managed’. This assumption overlooks the various divisions that fragment management. It is
incorrect to envisage managers as a homogeneous group; there is a danger that CMS, in this way,
merely projects all the ‘bad’ on the managers. It also ignores the fact that managers are themselves
managed as well.
Morrill, C. and Fine, G.A. (1997). Ethnographic contributions to organizational sociology.
Sociological Methods and Research, 25 (4), 424451:
Qualitative analysis was the primary means by which research was conducted in the early decades of
this century. From the writings of Taylor, much early analysis consisted of detailed descriptions of a
company or introspective renditions of personal experience.
Ethnography is an example of qualitative analysis with a rich, detailed description.
Ethnography: the sustained, explicit, methodical observation and paraphrasing of social situations in
relation to their naturally occurring contexts.
Ethnography does not involve qualitative fieldwork in which the fieldworker does not remain in the
field to become saturated with firsthand knowledge of the setting. It also excludes field studies in
which the goal is not to describe and interpret the experiences of organizational members but rather to
produce critical interventions into organizational functioning. In sum, in ethnography:
The fieldworker always remains in the field for a certain period (for months or even years);
Its goal is always to describe and interpret the experiences of organizational members.
Symbolic interactionism: organizations as “systems of meaning”.
Interactionism: […] that we know things by their meanings, that meanings are created through social
interaction, and that meanings change through interaction.
, Traditional ethnographic work reveals unintended consequences of intended managerial decisions, as
well as the divergences between front stage and back stage organizational behaviour (see Goffman,
1959).
Negotiated orders in which individual actors and groups act purposively, socially, and with some
measure of agency exist within and between organizations and their environments.
Negotiated order: approach in sociology that is interested how meaning is created and maintained in
organizations. It has a particular focus on human interactions.
Negotiated order is a theory developed largely within symbolic interactionism to depict social
organization occurring in and through people negotiating with each other. Designed in part as a
response to the critique that interactionists had no tools for analysing social structure and were too
subjective, the theory attempts to depict social organization as an active achievement of social actors,
and not as a static or reified concept.
Ethnographers study both the constraining and enabling relationships between organizations and
their larger environments. Strauss (1978) claims that the process of negotiation is at the heart of
social order and social change, which also means it is at the heart of sociology itself and therefore
interesting to take into account. Hence, the proper level of analysis for negotiated order analysis of
organizations is the mesolevel: the domain in which interaction among groups is limited by
structural constraints, such as resources, authority structures and broader institutional
arrangements.
The obdurate reality of external pressures affects how organizations are structured. These pressures,
in turn, affect negotiating contexts and shape organizational outcomes.
The negotiated order approach would also seem to be a wellsuited theoretical tool if one is interested
in connecting different levels of analysis and linking interactions to organizations and overarching
societal structures. Ethnographic research permits the examination of how decisions and policies
made at one level of the market affect other levels, particularly those less powerful or more resource
dependent.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, ethnographers also examined the multifunctional roles of external
relations. External relations both constrain and enable workers and management as they pursue their
collective interests, e.g. it enables management to gain what it most desires: a docile and stable labour
force that ostensibly (ogenschijnlijk) accepts managerial control.
Role of social networks: “filling in the gaps of formal structure” to address analytic concerns about
managerial decision making.
Ethnography and organizational change:
In perhaps no other substantive area is ethnography more suitable as a method than in studying the
dynamics of organizational change. Ethnography as a method can address interpretive
problems/questions such as:
How do we temporarily punctuate change? i.e. At what point are multiple changes a pattern of
continuity?
Is change something that happens to an organization or something that an organization
enacts? i.e. Does change emanate from within an organization or from the external
environment?
The negotiated order approach has taught us that incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule,
not the exception in organizational life. Individuals and groups constantly adapt, which in turn
produces slight shifts in the footing of actors. But organizational change can strike beyond these shifts
and reach deep into organizational structures and strategies. Radical rapid alterations in
organizational components are relatively rare but are dramatic and analytically challenging when they
occur.
Change does not emanate from one individual’s or group’s intended strategy or decision; it emerges
from the constant give and take of political struggles. Interest groups emerge around issues of, e.g.:
a) whether to grow or not to grow;
b) diversify or centralize;
c) bring in new technology or not.
