Power in Organizational Society
3.4 Introducing the Meso-Level
The micro and macro notions of power do not exhaust the range of experiences we have with power. We don’t constantly live in dyadic con- fl icts. Our exchanges with society certainly go beyond small group arrangements. We follow instructions and obey authorities, even when orders come from those whom we don’t have prior contacts with. Power will be felt most strongly in observable confl icts at the level of interpersonal relations. Yet power exists across a variety of social forms. We are compelled to act in certain ways by more distant forces. The macro-approach to power has strengthened our ability to map out these structural forces.
However, important questions remain. A particu- larly intriguing one has to do with the reach of power relations. For example, those who live in times of rapid social changes, or at the epicenter of a structure undergoing transformation, will feel the impact of power formation and redistri- bution most directly. But the rest of the popula- tion will be affected by power relations only through several degrees of mediation. What micro and macro notions of power leave unex- plored, in short, is the meso-level architecture
that regularizes micro-exchanges, bears the brunt of macro transformation, and constitutes the more immediate environment within which power is experienced, challenged, and reformat- ted collectively (Tuner 2012 : 25). This is the environment of formal organizations.
Formal organizations are omnipresent, but the analysis of power has not been a prominent issue in organization studies (Pfeffer 1981 : 9–10). The vast majority of us are associated with formal organizations in one way or another, by either working for them, learning in them, or relying on them for goods or services. Examples of organi- zations are numerous. Corporations, parties, schools, clubs, professional associations, and international organizations are organizations devoted to economic, political, educational, rec- reational, professional, or normative purposes.
This meso-level reality is not just an analytical construct. It is such an ingrained part of our empirical routines that we tend to take our orga- nizational environment for granted. Power, as is routinized in careers, budgets, the divisions of labor, and all other standard operating procedures and rules, paradoxically remains hidden in plain sight. In organized purposeful settings, the line between being compelled to do something and being capable of doing something can be blurry and confl ated. Uncovering how power operates, hides, and transfers in organizations is therefore a necessary scholarly exercise, especially if we aim to develop a fuller understanding of how our intentions, behaviors, and beliefs are regulated in organizational society.
What are organizations and what are their key features? One of the most widely accepted defi ni- tions of formal organizations is offered by W. Richard Scott. Organizations are “collectivi- ties oriented to the pursuit of relatively specifi c goals and exhibiting relatively highly formalized social structures.” (Scott 1992 : 23) To elaborate, these collectivities organize social lives such that they sustain long-term visions, aggregate courses of action, and give our existences collective pur- poses independent of individual choices.
Internally, organizations bear formalized struc- tures, of which hierarchies and specialization through an internal division of labor are two most
prominent features. One should not underrate the extent to which formal structures construct our social realities, a point to which we will return later. For now, it should suffi ce to say that formal- ization entails the abstraction of a large amount of concrete data so that further social action can be governed by that abstraction without having to
“go behind it” (Stinchcombe 2001 ). Formal orga- nizations arrange society by abstraction; they designate roles and positions, and regularize pat- terns of interactions. Organizations inscribe these designations in binding charts, procedures, and rules so that goals, positions, roles, and patterns of interactions outlive individual participants. In this sense, organizations, once created, achieve an emergent reality of their own. We enter an organization expecting to accept the organiza- tional reality as it is and “socialize” into it (Wanous et al. 1984 ; Hall 1987 ).
3.4.1 A Brief History of the Emergence
of Organizational Society
Before we delve deeper into the question of how power operates in organizations, a brief history on the emergency of organizational society will be instructive. Various authors have refl ected on how the ascendance of organizations have revo- lutionized pre-modern social structures and changed the power balance between different segments of the populations. James Coleman ( 1974 ) provides a revealing account on the rise of corporate actors that changed the distribution of power in societies. This gradual movement com- menced from the “incorporation” of churches, landed communities, and kings as these entities acquired the status of unifi ed actors with rights to own, contract, engage in transactions, and collec- tively embody honor and authority. The corpo- rate form taken by these social entities eventually spread to all sorts of associations, and engulfed also those originally non-purposive social units in which persons were born such as the family, the village and the nation. According to Coleman, this layer of “intermediary entities” emerged between the state and individuals and created
much more fl exible social structures and mobile persons than those in traditional societies (Coleman 1974 : 31). Natural persons can join or leave corporations and can establish its relation- ship with corporations through various resources invested in them without having to participate physically.
While Coleman argues that the rise of corpo- rate society increased the total sum of power in societies and therefore expanded freedom and liberty, other authors offer mixed assessments.
The classical author on bureaucracy, Max Weber, on the one hand, celebrates the effectiveness with which bureaucratic organizations rationalized capitalist production and the administration of the state. According to Weber, formal authority, in combination with specialized professional knowledge inscribed in bureaucratic positions, provides an unprecedented legitimate foundation to domination and ruling. One the other hand, Weber alerts us to the dehumanizing effect of these “iron-cages.” Bureaucratic machines can thrive for the mere sake of reproducing them- selves (Weber 1978 ). This is the “bad” kind of formalism that Stinchcombe also refers to, a for- malism that does not serve substantial purposes and prevents others from making improvements to the abstraction on which successful formaliza- tion rests (Stinchcombe 2001 ). Put more suc- cinctly, both authors highlight the very real possibility that formal organizations generate a new form of oppressive, even callous control.
In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, the rise of big corporations and the intensifi ed bureaucratization of all spheres of lives prompted new waves of refl ection on how organizations have reconfi gured political and economic power.
Michels observes that how incumbents of power- ful organizational structures would become more interested in investing in the reproduction of the structure per se rather than in pursing the goals that the organization was originally set up to achieve (Michels 1959 ). Michels focuses on political organizations, but this same process can be observed in the conglomeration movement, a historical phase in which corporations begin pur- suing growth strategies through diversifi cation and vertical integration. John Galbraith argues
that, as large corporations extended the scope of their activities, they became threats to effi ciency:
as price and wages could be determined through internal planning instead of competition, a Michelsian dynamic set in ( 1959 ). Corporations, put differently, began exercising market power, a point Galbraith makes in the context of a larger argument that economic organizations can pur- sue control and growth at the expense of earnings and effi ciency—an argument that in turn is heav- ily indebted to Veblen ( 1934 ). In the production realm, modern technologies such as the assembly line and the practices associated with “scientifi c management” created a deep cleavage between workers and the managerial class. Clegg has an insightful account of how these new workplace relations, with their new routines and their push towards specialization, facilitated the production of predictable and compliant agency. This causal process of forming collective dispositions of the employees, Clegg argues, paved the “foundation of organization power” (Clegg 2009 ).
In parallel to these critiques of large organiza- tions, an array of authors emerged as the founda- tional generation of organization researchers, focused on a mission to dissolve the myth of “sci- entifi c management” and to understand the orga- nizational causes of its imperfections.
Infl uentially, James March and Herbert Simon delved into the decision-making process in orga- nizations from a perspective of human cognition.
They found that individuals in organizations are subject to bounded rationalities in processing information, elaborating programs, and evaluat- ing outcomes. Cognitive limitation drives the ten- dency for organizations to routinize and places a sunk cost on organizational innovation (March and Simon 1958 ). Still another strand of the lit- erature, heralded by Stinchcombe’s famous 1965 essay, surveys the “relation of society outside organizations to the internal life of organiza- tions” ( 1965 : 142). Stinchcombe suggests that social structure, comprising “groups, institutions, laws, population characteristics, and sets of social relations that form the environments of the orga- nization” ( 1965 :142) leave imprints on the forms and power relations within the organizations and affect their survival rates. Newly founded organi-
zations in particular suffer from a “liability of newness” in that for social roles and relations to settle into stable patterns to answer to organiza- tional goals, organizations have to go through a risky process of wrestling with employees’ exist- ing identities and bonding a group of strangers including with other organizations. Stinchcombe suggests that after a certain threshold, the attenu- ation of social and cognitive discrepancies paves the way for routinization. This point echoes March and Simon’s argument and generates tre- mendous insights for our understanding of individual- organization relationships.
Organizational forms have continued to evolve in the past half a century. Organization scholars have drawn our attention to at least two directions of development. First of all, it is harder for orga- nizations to be self-sustaining: an increasing amount of organizational decisions must address inter-organizational concerns. With intensifi ed market competition, faster turnover of products, and more volatile technological and fi nancial markets, incumbents fi nd themselves in constant battles with challengers; both also have to react to regulatory attempts of government units and a broader array of stakeholders. This type of “stra- tegic action fi eld” rewards the kind of “social skills” that can secure cooperation from other organizations and forge a new form of collective identity (Fligstein and McAdam 2012 ). Secondly, scholars also affi rm that soft power and a cultur- ally based type of legitimacy have gained more importance in soliciting individual compliance.
This is not to say that reward and punishment have ceased to be the bread and butter of organi- zational sanctions, but “soft power” is assuming a stronger role in shaping both the body and souls of “organizational men” (and women) (William and Nocera 2002 ; Clegg 2009 ). Organizations are perceived as being capable of developing per- sonas and embodying “organizational cultures,”
which employees internalize as their own values (see esp. Selznick 2010 ). Organization ethnogra- phers disclose that even blue-collar workers engaging the most tedious job fi nd the moral meaning in their work (Burawoy 1982 ; Lamont 2002 ). Norms, identities, and moral standards can be both homegrown and imported.
Organizational practices and forms are perceived legitimate simply because other organizations, especially the leading ones, are pursuing them as well. Either way, individual compliance origi- nates not from beliefs in the inherent effi ciency of certain organizational structures or production arrangements, but from cultural consensuses and fads (DiMaggio and Powell 1983 ).
Overall, these refl ections on the evolution of organizational power provide historical back- ground to our understanding of their contempo- rary variations. They also call for systematic efforts at taking stock of the forms of power spe- cifi c to formal organizations. Let’s reiterate here that this task is possible because, regardless of the variations in technologies and management styles, formal organizations share common char- acteristics and undertake similar activities, such as settings goals, designing bureaucratic struc- tures, delegating authorities, securing stable per- sonnel, utilizing expertise, and identifying organizational boundaries. Theoretical exposi- tions on organization and power are scattered in organization studies and are rarely placed in organic conversations with existing studies of power. Our synthesis below draws inspirations on existing research but also attempts to sharpen and articulate the distinctive operation of power at the meso-level.
3.4.2 Empowering Organizations
We argue that organizations intersect with power in two major ways: First, organizations serve as vehicles to power. Second, organizations shape the nature of power by making it invisible and multiplying the sources from which power springs. In this section, we focus on the fi rst proposition—the “empowering” aspect of orga- nizations, while the next section is devoted to elaborating our second point.
Humans are purposive beings. Power is a means to achieve those purposes, however con- strued. Organizations are a regularized form of such means. Through coordination, organizations can achieve much more than a mere aggregation
of individuals could. This supra-individual power of organizations has two implications.
First, organized collectivities are not simply the sum of individuals’ preexisting wills and actions; organizations generate the kind of insti- tutional surplus that reduces the cost of collective action. Both eminent features of organizational structure—hierarchy and the division of labor—
have this function. Hierarchies streamline fl ows of orders and information and reasonably narrow down the orientation of participants to their direct superiors. Divisions of labor encourage patterns of specialization and in general can reduce the cost of training, while creating stronger commit- ment from those who accumulate human capital specifi c to the organization. Hierarchical power can certainly be constraining; just as specializa- tion is also a source of alienation. Nevertheless, formal organizations are expected to “get things done” by channeling individuals into clearly des- ignated duties and overcoming intractable collec- tive action problems that any group efforts might encounter. Individuals, irrespective of the extent to which they personally agree with the actions organizations take, potentially benefi t from the collective gains that organizations make possible.
Second, in most legal contexts, organizations have the juridical status of persons, so they enjoy rights just as natural persons would but are immune to certain punishments applicable to natural persons. The meso-level reality indeed has a legal infrastructure. Organizations as per- sons enjoy limited responsibilities and only receive fi nancial rather than corporeal punish- ments. You certainly cannot ask an organization to serve prison terms. On the other hand, organi- zations are allowed to conduct many activities that natural persons carry out. They can buy, sell, invest, donate, or even vote. Presently this empowering effect of organizations is an interna- tional norm. The existence of robust and diverse organizations is perceived as a sign of strong and healthy civil societies. The absence of them, by contrast, indicates that power is monopolized and centralized in society, probably by single or oli- garchic entities.
Both means, erecting formalized routines and conferring legal existences to them, enable orga- nizations to operate on a long-range horizon, and towards relatively long term objectives. Long- term goals compel trust building and suspend short-term domination. Organized methods of obtaining and exercising power also appear much less conspicuous than one-time use of coercive method. They take on evolutionary and routin- ized features, with attention divided among staged goals and numerous small tasks.
3.4.3 The Nature of Power in Organizations
Organizations are effective means to pursue power; they also shape the nature of power itself.
The same features—organizational hierarchies and routines—that are ostensibly means to effi - ciency also exert power internally on organiza- tional members. Theoretically, power is hierarchical and concentrated in organizations.
The pyramid organizational structures are direct refl ections of hierarchical power relations. For this reason, Michels warned against the oligar- chic tendency of bureaucratic power (Michels 1959 ). Along the same lines, Rueschemeyer dis- cusses the “disproportionate power” found in organizations, that is, how power concentrated in the hands of individuals and groups with similar interest and preferences is amplifi ed when mobi- lized through organizational means, partly because organizations justify themselves thor- ough claims to higher effi ciency (Rueschemeyer 1986 : 46).
But if hierarchical power were so equivocal and inescapable, organizations would be repres- sive and emotionally violent environments, con- stantly threatening the viability of their organizational mandates. In reality, these are aberrant instances rather than the norm. We join organization theorists who submit that power is diffuse in organizations, rather than concentrated (Bacharach and Lawler 1980 ; Bell et al. 2010 ). It is not simply that power does not cause tremen- dous disruptions in organizations because it is based on consent, rather than coercion, or that, as
March and Simon put it, because power seems
“natural,” since “hierarchical ordering fi ts more general cultural norms for describing social rela- tions in terms of domination and subordination”
(1993: 3). Rather, formal organizations transform power dynamics into means-end problems call- ing for practical solutions. As Rueschemeyer ( 1986 ) has most powerfully argued, organiza- tions fi nd legitimacy in their pursuit of effi ciency through endless specialization, but in doing so they hide the truth of effi ciency: that is it not uni- versally valid criterion independent of the inter- ests of those who decide whose goals should be effi ciently pursued.
First , organizations formalize power relation- ship into positions and ranks ; positions and ranks stabilize expectations and embody organization - specifi c norms and values . Except for organiza- tions in the midst of formative and transformative times (as highlighted by Stinchcombe 1965 ), organizational positions and ranks are indepen- dent of the idiosyncrasies of their occupants.
They create stable expectations about the scope of their duties, the structure of rewards, and the schedule of promotions. Weber uses this point to illustrate the merit of bureaucracy in achieving effi ciency and impartiality. We are interested in reconnecting formal ordering with the discussion of power. Managing expectations by virtue of creating career ladders plays an instrumental role in translating power into regulations. Patterns of expectations minimize the contingent exercise of coercion. With rules and procedures in place, individuals do not have to negotiate their benefi ts with organizations individually so that they reduce possible discretions. Signing onto these career expectations amounts to signing onto a social contract in which personal freedom is traded with life security, so that voluntarily, “the social control of one’s behavior by others becomes an expected part of organizational life”
(Pfeffer 1981 : 5). Positions and ranks are also building blocks of the system of organizational norms and values. Sociologists, despite their dis- agreements on how norms and values are formed, concur that norms and values play an indispensi- ble role in holding society together and stabiliz- ing social interactions. Organizations are the