Abstract
“A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost,” Alfred North Whitehead famously said. If Whitehead is to be believed, then sociology must be in serious trouble. Physics graduate students do not read Newton. Economics graduate students treat Adam Smith as no more than an historical curiosity. Yet our students receive a heavy (and obligatory) diet of classical theory. Even my contemporary theory class (contemporary theory!) contains doses of Durkheim and Weber. Some of our field’s most distinguished members, including Art Stinchcombe and Randy Collins, continue to extol the value of the classics. And most of my colleagues, along with a majority of CS readers, probably see this as a good thing.
In the view of the editor of this volume, the field of organization studies has the opposite problem. For many years, the study of organizations was linked to the disciplines, housed primarily in departments of sociology and psychology. Organizational theorists in sociology were well aware of their debt to Weber, and critics were similarly aware of their debt to Marx. Bureaucracy, as a primary feature of modern society, was a central concern of our discipline. In recent years, however, the study of organizations has moved increasingly into business schools, undoubtedly due to the enormous resource advantages that these schools enjoy. Paul Adler, a professor of management at the University of Southern California, whose background is in economics and who taught for several years at Stanford’s School of Engineering, has been on something of a crusade to bring a more sociological approach into schools of business.
Sociology has in fact made inroads into the business school world, but in a relatively narrow way: the focus has been primarily on organizational performance and strategic decision making. Adler’s goal is to persuade his fellow management professors to ask the kinds of “big” questions that sociologists ask. The starting point for doing this, he argues, is the classics.
To produce this volume, Adler convened a conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Academy of Management. He managed to recruit an all-star cast of contributors, most of them sociologists, each of whom tries to make a case for the relevance of a particular classical thinker for contemporary organizational analysis. The book is divided into four sections: two general introductory chapters (by Adler and Patricia Thornton) that provide an overview and justification for the book, sections on European and American theorists respectively, and an afterward by Jerry Davis and Mayer Zald (this brief chapter, punctuated with Davis unique brand of humor, is almost by itself worth the book’s otherwise excessive price). Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel receive two chapters each, while Tocqueville, Michels, Tarde, Schumpeter, and Norbert Elias round out the Europeans. The section on American theorists is more varied, with a focus on particular thinkers (Veblen, Du Bois, James, Mary Parker Follett, Dewey, Commons, and Parsons), as well as schools of thought (the Chicago School, symbolic interactionism, the Columbia School) and essays on the corporation and bureaucratic theory in general.
Without exception, these chapters are first-rate and full of insights, even for those well-versed in classical theory. They certainly make a case for the continued vitality of these time-worn works. But will they accomplish the editor’s goal—that organizational scholars in schools of business comb through the classics and begin to address the broader issues that they have thus far neglected? I think the answer, unfortunately, is no. As good as these chapters are, the authors fail to make a convincing case for how reading the classics will force management scholars to reconsider, and revise, the questions they ask and the approaches they use.
To take one example, Richard Swedberg demonstrates his customary erudition in a fascinating essay on Tocqueville’s concept of associations. Yet Tocqueville, as Swedberg presents him, seems more relevant for the study of politics than organizations. It would be nice if organizational scholars paid more attention to politics (as well as the administration of state-level organizations, as Weber did), but I doubt that management professors, even if they read Swedberg’s article, would find ideas that they would deem relevant to their own work. Similar examples abound. Adler, in his essay on Marx, makes a compelling attempt to resuscitate Marx’s concept of the forces of production. Stewart Clegg and Michael Lounsbury argue persuasively that Weber had a more critical analysis of bureaucracy than was traditionally believed (a point well-known among sociologists, but probably less so among professors of management). Pamela Tolbert and Shon Hiatt provide several interesting insights into the work of Michels, demonstrating his continued relevance for social movement theory. Paul Hirsch, Peer Fiss, and Amanda Hoel-Green offer a striking insight from Durkheim, noting the possible resurgence of mechanical solidarity resulting from globalization. All great stuff, but I fear that these authors are preaching to the converted. Will those who need to read this book read it, and if they do, will they begin to ask the big questions that, in the editor’s view, need to be asked? Even the chapters that do the best job of showing the connections between classical ideas and contemporary organizational theory—such as Frank Dobbin’s application of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms to current work on sensemaking and neo-institutional theory—may not have the outcome Adler wants. Does one really need to read Durkheim to make use of these ideas? Wouldn’t a good reading of Weick, or Meyer and Rowan, be sufficient?
The fact that this volume is unlikely to achieve Adler’s goals is no reason for us not to read it, of course. It is a very good book that will provide countless hours of intellectual stimulation. I am uncertain that even we sociologists will gain any clear payoff in terms of our research. Yet if we are willing to suspend our concern with instrumental benefits, and focus instead on the intrinsic joy of ideas for their own sake, then reading this book is likely to be a rewarding experience, even if it reinforces Whitehead’s implication that our discipline is “lost.”