Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory?

Transcription

1 Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory? Peter Fleming and André Spicer Introduction One of the most notable contributors to the cannon we now call organization theory is the Anglo-Australian Stewart Clegg. Over the span of three decades Clegg has made a range of interventions in organization theory. Topics addressed include modernism/postmodernism, Marxist, Weberian and Foucauldian theories of organization, epistemology and reflexivity, and comparative studies of capitalism (particularly in East Asia). The most enduring concern that runs through his work is the issue of power, which will be the focus of this chapter. In his work on power there is a sustained attempt to debunk assumptions that it ultimately rests in the hands of the powerful. These assumptions are rooted in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1651/1985) and his idea that all power in society finally rests in the body of the sovereign (see also Kaulingfreks, in this volume). In place of this sovereign theory of power, we will argue that Clegg has made significant efforts to advance what we might call a Machiavellian theory of power. This involves conceptualizing power as a network of relations in which actors are embedded. While this more diffuse understanding of power remains an abiding strand throughout Clegg s work, the way he builds a Machiavellian theory of organizational power changes significantly. In this chapter we will trace out these shifting configurations of Clegg s Machiavellian approach. We will demonstrate how his early work focussed on interpretive action by examining how power involved the interplay of rule and domination (Clegg, 1975). In later writings, Clegg maintains that power is the product of concrete social structures such as bureaucracy, capitalism and class (Clegg, 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980; Clegg, Boreham and Dow, 1986). Then, during the late 1980s and 1990s, Clegg s theory of power undergoes some radical revisions resulting in the rather baroque circuits of power model (Clegg, 1989a). In what follows we shall trace this Machiavellianism through his three successive iterations of a theory of power. We will conclude by critically assessing some difficult issues that emerge from his oeuvre.. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

2 Peter Fleming and André Spicer Power, rule and domination Clegg s Power, Rule and Domination appeared in an intellectual scene dominated by functionalist approaches (eg, Thompson, 1967) which saw power relations as a subsystem used by groups to preserve function within the system rather than destroy it (Hickson et al, 1971: 217). Clegg s major contribution in this monograph was to show that power is not immediately given by a functional system but is practically achieved through relational action, rules of the game, and deeper iconic systems of domination. By attending to these three factors we are able to move away from seeing power as a series of sterile operations between subsystems and begin to trace out the lived processes through which actors attempt to negotiate and re-negotiate the rules, yet willingly submit to the iconic domination of a form of life in which the ideal of profitability is King Harvest it must be reaped (Clegg, 1975: ). Clegg launched his efforts to develop a theory of power by drawing on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, 1958). Instead of seeking truth in a perfect match between words and reality, Wittgenstein suggests that truth lies in the conventions that mark something out as true. Truth about what power is can only be found in a conventional agreement, with no necessity residing in the world (Clegg, 1975: 7). Therefore the reality of power may be no more than our ways of speech (Clegg, 1975: 8). This approach to power underlines the various conventions or language games that determine how power may be talked about. These conventions can be found in academic dialogue (like the community power debate) or in practices of doing power in the office or workshop. What Clegg seems to be suggesting is a move away from the assumption that power is a single body which can be viewed from an external point. In its place we find a more Machiavellian engagement with power as a situation-dependent practical activity in which the theorist is already implicated. Clegg situates his work in the community power debate. This consisted of a group of North American political scientists concerned with the question of who holds power in a community. C. Wright Mills (1957) sparked off this debate by arguing that a small power elite ruled American cities whose influence crossed politics, public institutions and business. Robert Dahl (1957, 1961) responded by arguing that power tends to be diffused among a range of largely independent individuals. For Dahl, power was observable in individual decision-making. Bachrach and Baratz (1962, 1971) subsequently responded to Dahl s behaviourist theory by arguing power was not only exercised through concrete acts of decision-making, but also through more insidious forms of agenda setting. By setting the agenda, powerful groups were able to define the issues that could be discussed, consequently rendering some issues non-decisions. Clegg locates himself in this debate because it moves away from the question of how power ought to be managed to that defining Machiavellian concern of how it is actually exercised. 96

3 Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory? The community power debate provides the building blocks for the way he studies power in Power, Rule and Domination (1975). He too identifies power as the everyday decision and non-decision making. Clegg supplements this approach with Wittgenstein s notions of language games and forms of life. These are the shared criteria of rationality actors use to assess a given situation. For instance, various bureaucrats and architects on a construction site share a deep-seated criterion of profitability that serves as the reference point for all decision-making. This deeper level, which was ignored by the community power debate, is what Clegg calls domination. A mediating process is then identified between the deep structure of domination and the surface play of power. He calls this mediating factor rule, which involves the perceived order or the interpretive work that people engage in, when they make sense of the world (Clegg, 1975: 60, 59). To understand a rule it is necessary to study how actors employ it to make sense of otherwise meaningless phenomena (Clegg, 1975: 67). Clegg provides a number of examples of workers on a construction site negotiating and adjusting these rules to their own advantage. For instance, he reports on an episode when a contractor bored a hole deeper than the two metres rule specified on the architectural drawings (Clegg, 1975: ). When asked by the site architect why he had done this, the contractor responded that he was following another rule specified on the drawings that suggested the bore needed to reach past normal clay and into sandy stony clay. The ensuing conflict between the contractor and the architect was largely around which rule should be mobilised. Bringing the three elements of power, rule and domination together, Clegg provided a comprehensive definition of power as being about the outcome issues enabled by the rule of a substantive rationality which is temporally and institutionally located. Underlying this rule is a specific form of domination (Clegg, 1975: 78). And each component is connected: The progression is from domination Æ rules Æ power (Clegg, 1975: 78). This early phase of Clegg s work highlights the everyday pragmatics of power relations in organizations. These relations are conceptualized in a Machiavellian register, as tactical mobilizations of interpretive procedures, rather than formal structures. Clegg, however, provides an unelaborated and somewhat universal theory of domination. All on the construction site are dominated by the king harvest (Clegg, 1975: 156) of profit, downplaying consideration of the asymmetrical distribution of life-chances between different social groups. Social structure Following the completion of Power, Rule and Domination (1975), Clegg set out to shift his analytical focus from language games to social structure, which he approached as ingrained forms of life. To do this he evoked the radical Weberian and Marxist traditions in The Theory of Power and Organization (1979), Organization, Class and Control (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980), and Class, 97

4 Peter Fleming and André Spicer Politics and the Economy (Clegg, Boreham and Dow, 1986). These works attempted to explain how domination is produced through the structures of capitalist society and the function of law and rule. To develop an explicit account of social structure, Clegg turns to 1970s European structuralism. Social structure is typically defined as an objective pattern of social relationships. In contrast, Clegg approaches it as the basic and unquestioned ground rules that actors invoke when they make decisions (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). Examples might include the profit motive assumed by managers or truth and progress appealed to by scientists to garner the necessary resources to continue their obtuse experiments. A central feature of social structure is what Clegg calls hegemonic domination. Following Gramsci (1971), Clegg (1979; Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980) argues that a cadre of intellectuals organize the background ethico-political commitments of certain social forms in civil society this group includes specific intellectuals such as academics and writers as well as organic intellectuals like union leaders, advertising and public relations officers, lobbyists and all others who seek to manipulate public assumptions. In the workplace, they are the vast group of rationalizers such as managers and consultants who systematically apply instrumental reason (Clegg, 1979). In this revised conceptualization of social structure, we notice that Clegg brings a significantly Machiavellian analytic to bear. Akin to Gramsci s (1971) Modern Prince, it is argued that systems of domination are created by intellectuals who carefully manipulate and organize the ground rules of social praxis. This alerts us to how social structure involves an ongoing process of cunning social reproduction. Weberian themes of rationalization and a Gramscian emphasis on hegemony set the agenda for much of Clegg s subsequent scholarship. Ultimately, what is achieved is a modified structuralist account of organizational power relations. This understanding of power relations involves a move away from earlier concerns with the mobilization and negotiation of rules in the workplace. A broad thread in this research appears to be an explanation of how hegemonic relations of domination are linked to a constellation of capitalist structures. These include the world system, the nation state and the labour process. For example, the concept of organizational environment is revised using neo-marxist world systems theory (Clegg, 1979), the labour process is examined via the hegemony of rationalized selection rules (Clegg, 1979) and organizational conflict is explained with reference to the underlying class structure of society (Clegg, 1981). This leads him to sketch a political economy of organizations (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980; Clegg, Boreham and Dow, 1986). It is possible to argue that the emphasis on structural concepts like hegemonic domination leads Clegg away from a Machiavellian analysis of how power is achieved and maintained. However, throughout his explication of hegemonic domination, Clegg consistently returns to the fact that this is something that must be actively produced and organized. The role that human labour plays in producing and reproducing these modes of domination is where the practical activities of power come into play. 98

5 Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory? Radical revisions In the late 1980s and early 1990s Clegg s theoretical approach and method of analysis changed in a manner that was labelled radical by even himself (Clegg, 1989a). Following his radical revision the focus transformed: class control and hegemonic relations of power, the rationalization of domination and worldsystems were repudiated and in its place appeared putative post-modernism. In Modern Organizations (1990) post-modernism is treated as both a scholarly framework that is non-essentialist, non-reductive and sensitive to contingency and a period in which the organizing mechanisms of modernity (standardized industrial production and consumption) become obsolete. According to Clegg (1989a, 1990, 1994a) times have changed: the illuminative powers of the modernist representation of bureaucracy fade into dusk in our increasingly postmodern organizational times (Clegg, 1994a: 151, also see Clarke and Clegg, 2002). And in terms of his erstwhile favoured critical theories of work, the grand-narratives of the past, licensed by Marx, by Science, by Reason, have now become discredited as icons of emancipation and enlightenment... (Clegg, 1990: 12). A key aspect of Clegg s revision in the 1990s was the championing of Foucault (eg, 1980) and his description of power as a disciplinary and microspatial process. Frameworks of Power (1989b) represents one of the clearest explications of his revised understanding of power. In it Clegg returns to the community power debate, paying particular attention to the radical Marxist approach developed by Lukes (1973). Lukes argued that while previous participants in the community power debate had identified significant dimensions of power in decision-making (Dahl, 1957) and non-decision-making (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962), they had inadvertently presumed that power was something behavioural and resource-based. Lukes famously counter-argued, is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have that is to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires? (Lukes, 1974: 23). The striking facet of Lukes argument is that power may operate not only on what we do and do not do, but also on our subjective desires and beliefs, so much so that we act contrary to what may otherwise have been our objective interests. Clegg locates Lukes in an analytical tradition that has its origin in the 17th century political theorist Thomas Hobbes. In his book, Leviathan,power is portrayed as the state-body of the Monarch, which is simultaneously a composite of the people (as the original frontispiece of Leviathan revealed). Central for Hobbes was the notion of sovereignty, understood as the expression of power in which a public good was achieved through the reproduction of the body politic usually in the form of covenants and pacts via divine fiat (Clegg, 1989b). The Leviathan represents a structured, centralized and sovereign order that holds in abeyance the continuous threat of disorder or what Hobbes called the intransigent state of nature. At the heart of the Hobbesian tradition, 99

6 Peter Fleming and André Spicer according to Clegg, is the idea that power operates in terms of a sovereign source, be that the state, the ruling class, capital, or a board of directors. Clegg has a number of objections. Power is automatically assumed to be something that the elite exclusively holds (and is thus reified), is concentrated in a zero-sum fashion (and thus deemed a quantifiable property), is intentionally exercised or revoked (and thus imputing rational intent), negates the ever-present threat of a state of nature (and thus prohibits, denies and refrains action) and follows a simple cause and effect trajectory (and thus operates in a way analogous to Newtonian mechanics). Perhaps the greatest criticism that Clegg has of Lukes evocation of this tradition is the idea of objective interests. He states here and elsewhere repeatedly that interests are not objectively structured by class or gender but are the products of powerful representations: it is a mistake to assume that interests get fixed by relations of production or any other structure (Clegg, 1994a: 156). Clegg approvingly cites Foucault s (1977, 1980) argument that this picture of power misses much of the complex processes of force found in disciplinary societies: Such theories still continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore the problems of law prohibition. We need to cut off the King s head: in political theory this is still to be done (Foucault, 1980: 121). Following others (such as Gramsci, 1971; Foucault, 1979a; Wolin, 1960), Clegg brings Machiavelli to the fore. Rather than being a state-sponsored legislator like Hobbes, Machiavelli is more a disenfranchised interpreter of how power is used to gain desired effects (see Bauman, 1987). In his Discourses and The Prince, Machiavelli takes a very strategic and amoral stance towards power: it does not reside in anyone s hands but is the effect of strategic manoeuvrings and cunning. Power is a game of illusion and allusion, which was so prevalent in Medici politics. The Prince offers highly contextual and non-generalizing advice to the prince regarding the best way to attain and retain dominance. Clegg argues that Machiavelli provides a more useful view of power because it is sensitive to unstable alliances and has a disinclination to believe in any single originating and decisive centre... (Clegg, 1989b: 6 7). To flesh out a Machiavellian theory of power, Clegg turns to the Foucauldian themes of disciplinary power, subjectification and discourse (Foucault, 1977, 1980, 1984). The rise of disciplinary power saw intermittent state violence (in the form of spectacles such as public execution and torture) replaced by a constant, micro-spatial training of the body through power/knowledge routines linked to the school, prison, factory and other dominant institutions. Under disciplinary power, both the mind and body are regulated by a force that is extremely quotidian (rather than spectacular) and becomes so pervasive that subjects come to apply it to themselves via a corporeal internalization (Clegg, 1989b; Clegg and Hardy, 1996; Clegg and Palmer, 1996). While Clegg has not provided the most persuasive application of this perspective to contemporary 100

7 Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory? workplaces (for that see Knights and Willmott, 1989; Deetz, 1992; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992), he does much to theoretically clarify the details of this form of power, which may then be used to shed light on organizational relations of domination and rule. In defining this new kind of power, informed as it is by a more Machiavellian tradition than a Hobbesian one, Clegg argues in a rather convoluted way that: Power becomes conceived as a set of techniques disciplining practices, as well as the more or less stable or shifting networks of alliances that such disciplinary practices make possible through their elective affinities between wholly contingent forms of identity, extended over a shifting terrain of practice and discursively constituted interests. (1994a: 157) There are a number of important points that are being made in this statement. Not only do we have Foucault s notion of disciplinary power and its focus on the technical and trained nature of the political field, but an interesting kind of pluralism now emerges in which power is thoroughly de-centred into a montage of floating alliances and temporary projects. This is not that far from the pluralism of Dahl (1961), despite the latter s episodic inclinations, which Clegg does not share. Moreover, power is taken to be something that produces identities and interests rather than simply repress them. Echoing Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Clegg argues this approach to power bypasses both an overstructuralized version of subjectivity (as a product of structure) and an understructuralized notion of the subject (whereby people are the authors of their own identities). Accordingly, a more embedded approach would be one that sought to ask what makes possible specific words, actions and their patterned assemblies as rationalities (Clegg, 1994a: 161) and views power as more or less complex organized agents engaged in more or less organized games (Clegg, 1989b: 20). Analysing power identifies how relations of agency and structure have been constituted discursively, how agency is denied to some and given to others... (Clegg, 1989b: 158). Here power is increasingly reduced to a discursive or even subjective process. We are told that an analysis of power is neither ethical nor micro-political; above all it is textual, semiotic, and inherent in the very possibility of textuality, meaning and signification in the social world (Clegg, 1994a: 149) and that there is only representation; there is no fixed, real, hidden or excluded term or dimension...power is the apparent order of takenfor-granted categories of existence as they are fixed and represented in a myriad of discursive forms and practices (Clegg, 1989b: ). Clegg consolidates these insights in his circuits of power model, developed in the closing chapters of Frameworks of Power (1989b) and is the fountainhead for subsequent research (eg, Clegg, 1990; Clegg et al., 2002; Stokes and Clegg, 2002; Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). The model is baroque, to say the least, and it is sometimes unclear how the conceptions of power discussed above apply to it, given its obvious debt to the system integration approaches proposed by 101

8 Peter Fleming and André Spicer Lockwood (1964) and Giddens (1979). The basic argument Clegg makes is that power has different levels that involve dynamics that are not dissimilar to his early tripartite of power (now episodic power), rule (now rules of practice) and domination. On the level of episodic power relations A decides what B will do. On the rules of practice level, A will attempt to set the rules by which the activities of A and B are judged. And on the level of domination the takenfor-granted forms of life for A and B are set. A circuit of power (the modern nation-state is offered as an example) activates these levels by connecting to social relations, agencies, standing conditions, outcomes, rules, environmental contingencies, and obligatory passage points (see Clegg, 1989b: 214). The importance of acknowledging the multidimensional nature of power is explained in the following manner: In the circuits framework, power is multifarious: it is episodic; it is also the circuit of power through which rules and domination, as well as the overall empirical articulation which configures the theoretical circuits in any application of the model (Clegg, 1989b: 215). Critical assessment The theory of power found in the circuits model is the apotheosis of his thinking on the subject. Indeed by his own admission: My views of power the central concept that laces together just about everything I have ever written have hardly shifted [since the publication of Frameworks of Power and Modern Organizations]. Indeed, in some essentials they were already in place in Power, Rule and Domination. Discourse is central; power is not a thing but a relation of flows; we are all practical ethnomethodologists seeking to enrol, translate, and otherwise socially construct the people, places, things and situations which matter to us but they are doing it too. (Clegg, 2005: 300) Clegg nicely summarizes some of his enduring concerns regarding power and organizations. While he contributes a Machiavellian analytic of power rule and domination, certain problems are evident that require further comment. We have seen that central to Clegg s conception of power is the assertion that there are only representations (Clegg, 1989b: 183) and that power works primarily by constituting subjectivity. But does power only do its work when it passes through representation or conscious discourse? The unconscious and material dimensions of the labour process are not really dealt with here and could be usefully explored in relation to discursive mechanisms (see Collinson, 1992). Also, how does one decide which representations are related to power and which are not are all representations an expression of power and would this not simply be claiming that power is everywhere? What Eagleton (1991) called discursive idealism is also a danger here because power is seen to be a purely discursive process who I am, what I do, the global economy, the international division of labour are all seen to be brought about by talk. Such a move inflates discourse to a transcendental causative principle. Indeed, it is 102

9 Stewart Clegg: Towards a Machiavellian organization theory? not certain where these powerful discourses or representations come from. As Eagleton (1991) argues, because there are no interests or political forces before the operation of discursive practices, discourses thus become purely selfconstituting, tautological practices. It is impossible to say where they derive from; they simply drop from the skies... (Eagleton, 1991: 214). Throughout Clegg s work there seems to be a strange tension between suggesting it is necessary to look at the concrete, contextually specific mobilization of power and the desire to build highly abstract models of how power functions. Given that Machiavelli eschewed generalities and focused only on the ethnographic and empirical context of power (something that Gramsci did too), there is something ironically abstract in Clegg s depiction of power. Whereas Machiavelli identified concrete tactics (examples abound of the Prince gaining the upper hand), Clegg tends to present or even legislate a universal definition of what power is and is not. Moreover, there is something very distant and cold in his rendition of Machiavelli, whose tales are vivid and rich with exemplary social practices. The amoralism thought to be at the heart of Machiavelli s analysis is translated by Clegg into an analysis of power (and resistance) that reads more like something we would find in a physics text-book. For example, Clegg maintains that after Machiavelli and then Foucault, instead of concentrating on the sovereignty of power [Foucault] argues that, on the contrary, we should study the myriad of bodies constituted as peripheral subjects as an effect of power (Clegg, 1994a: 158). All of this seems to be a very aloof and sterile way of explaining something as hot and contested as power relations. In each of Clegg s major explications of his approach to power, we find increasingly intricate models. The initial iteration found in Power, Rule and Domination is a relatively parsimonious attempt to bring a complex theoretical vocabulary to understand organizational power relations. However, as Clegg s work develops, he adds a bewildering range of variables and processes. The end result is the Byzantine circuits of power system. This attempt to bring all possible variables into one conceptual grid reflects the grand theory tendency of mainstream 1970s sociology. When conceptual systems become all embracing the inevitable abstraction can leave one overwhelmed by its sheer scope and under-whelmed by its applicability to specific workplaces. The final problem with Clegg s theory of power is his unwillingness to go beyond formalist description and develop a more normative political theory. As Clegg himself says, one does not tell people what they should do there are churches and pulpits aplenty, as well as consultants, to fulfil that function (Clegg, 2000: 78, also see Clegg and Courpasson, 2004). To put this another way, while Clegg provides an analysis of how power works in organizations and the possible problems associated with regimes of domination, we are not offered any statement of how he would like power relations to be. The only indication of a normative view is expressed in his work on postmodernism (Clegg, 1990). The political utopia we find here is one of liberal small-scale networked production. To develop a consistent normative political philosophy would require going beyond a Machiavellian approach of merely describing power relations. 103

10 Peter Fleming and André Spicer We would be pushed to ask the broader questions about which political order we actually want in organizations. The resources we would draw upon would be found in political theories of justice. We would have to be clear whether we want a conservative order, a liberal order, a libertarian order, a socialist order, an anarchist order or perhaps something else altogether. We would also have to ask about the ethical criteria we use to assess organizations, and thus fully reclaim the language of politics. References Bachrach, P. and M. S. Baratz (1962) Two faces of power American Political Science Review, 56: Bachrach, P. and M. S. Baratz (1971) Power and Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters. Cambridge: Polity. Clarke, T. and S. Clegg (2002) Changing Paradigms: The Transformation of Management Knowledge for the 21 st Century. London: HarperCollins Business. Clegg, S. (1975) Power, Rule and Domination: A Critical and Empirical Understanding of Power in Sociological Theory and Organization Life. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clegg, S. (1979) The Theory of Power and Organization. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clegg, S. (1981) Organization and control Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4): Clegg, S. (1989a) Radical revisions: Power, discipline and organizations Organization Studies, 10(1): Clegg, S. (1989b) Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Clegg, S. (1990) Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World. London: Sage. Clegg, S. (1994a) Social theory for the study of organization: Weber and Foucault Organization, 1(1): Clegg, S. (2000) Globalizing the intelligent organization in J. Garrick and C. Rhodes (eds.) Research and Knowledge at Work. London: Routledge. Clegg, S. (2005) Vita Contemplativa: A life in part Organization Studies, 26(2): Clegg, S. and C. Hardy (1996). Some dare call it power in S. Clegg, C. Hardy and W. Nord (eds.) Handbook of Organization Studies. London: Sage. Clegg, S. and D. Courpasson (2004) Political hybrids: Tocquevillean views on project organizations Journal of Management Studies, 41(4): Clegg, S. and D. Dunkerley (1980) Organization, Class and Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clegg, S. and G. Palmer (eds.) (1996) Politics of Management Knowledge. London: Sage. Clegg, S., M. Kornberger and C. Rhodes (2004) Noise, parasites and translation: Theory and practice in management consulting Management Learning, 35(1): Clegg, S., P. Boreham and G. Dow (1986) Class, Politics and the Economy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Collinson, D. (1992). Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Dahl, R. (1957) The concept of power Behaviorial Science, 2: Dahl, R. (1961) Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deetz, S. (1992). Disciplinary power in the modern corporation in M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds.) Critical Management Studies. London: Sage. Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: an Introduction. London: Verso. 104

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