1Final Paper Hinrichs

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Running Head: Symbolic Interpretivism & Modernist Perspectives / Epistemology & Ontology

Symbolic Interpretivism & Modernist Perspectives

Relating to Epistemology & Ontology

By

Ivan D. Mclaughlin

OM8010 - Principles of Organization Theory and Practice

Dr. Hinrichs

2

Capella University

12/7/2010

Abstract

For the past few weeks and studying the three organizational

theory perspectives from various authors, it’s been found /

studied and investigated Organizational Theory and its concepts

as well as its historic background. This paper will compare and

contrast each of the perspectives which are: Modernism, Symbolic

Interpretivism and Post-Modernism in addition the Epistemology &

Ontology perspective. But let me first discuss a little history

of Organizational Theory. Organization theory has attracted

critical attention. In most studies/research it’s been argued

that there has been a tendency for a narrow management plus

psychology perspective which has little to do with real-life

enterprises. The study of organizations for the benefit of

identifying common themes for the purpose of solving problems,

maximizing efficiency and productivity, and meeting the needs of

stakeholders. Generally, Organization Theory can be

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conceptualized as studying three major subtopics: individual

processes, group processes and organizational processes. This

brings me to the purpose of my research. Hatch (2006) processed

three theoretical perspectives in which I previously stated in

the beginning.

Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… 2

Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………….3

Tables…………………………………………………………………………………. 16

4

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………. 4

Ontology & Epistemology …………………………………………………………… 7

Modernism …………………………………………………………………………… 9

Postmodern Perspective ………………………………………………………………12

Symbolic Interpretivism ……………………………………………………………... 15

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………. 17

References ……………………………………………………………………………. 19

Introduction

To understand organizational theory one must first understand

what vital parts prompt this perspective/understanding. Multiple

perspectives are as follows: post-modernism, modernism, and

symbolic-interpretive. According to Hatch (2006) “the concepts

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and theories of a particular perspective offers you distinctive

thinking tools with which to craft ideas about organizations and

organizing.” Hatch (2006) stated that learning to use multiple

perspectives can assist us with making us aware of the

assumptions and values underlying our theory and practice, which

in turn should make us more conscious of our reasons for doing

things and better understand the reasons behind the actions taken

by others.” (Hatch, 2006, p. 27). With this being said, being

able to echo on our reasoning/understanding processes and

evaluate them to those being used by others will expand and build

on our ethical awareness. It’s also vital that as scholar

practitioners that we develop our cognitive skills in order to

theorize and understand how different perspectives

influence/shape an organization, now to compare and contrast each

of the organizational perspectives. The question: What are the

assumptions underlying the management of organizations from the

three organization theory perspectives? Before the answer is

provide to this particular question, there are two philosophical

choices in which will be discussed: Ontology and Epistemology.

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From this definition of Ontology we can assume that is would be a

study or concern regarding what kinds of things exist and what

entities are in the universe. Hatch (2006) states that ontology

concerns our assumptions about truth. With this information, it’s

understood that belief, assumptions and knowledge of the world

influence how researchers carry out their research, how leaders

design and manage their organizations and how each of us relate

to the world and other people. Learning to use and incorporate

multiple perspectives can assist one with becoming aware of the

assumptions and values that may underlie regarding theory or

practice. With knowing and understanding this, your understanding

will make one more conscious of why actions are being made.

Within this paper, comparing and contrasting Symbolic-

Interpretivist perspective & Modernist Perspectives is found as:

Symbolic-interpretivist perspective also acknowledged as the

qualitative approach follows the ontology of the subjectivists

and is the interpretivist’s epistemology. A rule of the

qualitative approach of the symbolic-interpretivist viewpoint is

that organizations are communities that are socially constructed

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within everyday communications. According to Hatch, (2006)

“organizational behaviorist examine and study how people create

and give meaning to their own experiences in organizational life

to gain an understanding and a way to gain insight through

discovering meaning by improving their comprehension of the

whole.” Qualitative research explores the richness, depth, and

complexity of phenomena. Symbolic interpretivism is also an

ontological view whose principle is that humans cannot know an

external, or objective, experience apart from one’s own

understanding or perception of that phenomenon (Hatch, 2007).

Symbolic-interpretivists insist that humans create social truth,

a key factor that closely interrelates with Transformative

Teleology (Stacey, 2000). It continues to view knowledge as

relative to the persons that knows and therefore insists that

one-sided awareness and individual meaning is the path towards

understanding an organization. According to Weick, (1969),

symbolic-interpretivist perspective is the most widely recognized

theory. He continues to explain that people looking at

organizations create in it what they want to see within it.

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People tend to act a particular way within organizations and

construct structures that were not there before took their

action. The symbolic-interpretivist perspective raises ones

perception of the organization to make it seem objective. With

that said this perspective recognizes that what we/one

understands about cultures, identities and environments is not

always real or touchable.

Culture, distinctiveness and environments are constructs we

create and use to assist us/one to make sense of organizations.

Berger and Luckman (1966), feels that we are frequently creating

and reconstructing objectives as it relates to organizations in

our minds. Organizations are open systems as it relates to a

symbolic-interpretivist perspective. Understanding this, prompts

one to recognize the role of the interconnected parts of an

organization that has to work within the environment in which it

exists.

Modernist thinking underlies many of the universal practices

of organizational management (Hatch, 2006). It continues to pilot

importance that managers continue to place on predicting the

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future, choosing particular strategies, inspiring individuals,

measuring activities, and controlling them in detailed order.

Modernist manifestations of thinking and behaving have grown and

were best prompted in the Industrial Revolution, when managers

placed an importance on discovering the best ways to complete

objectives through specialty and division of labor (Bolman &

Deal, 2003

Ontology and Epistemology

Ontology explains how people imagine/view. One question that

I process regarding this perspective … is there in fact a

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certainty and if so what is its purpose? It’s vital that one

understands that importance that being able not to set boundaries

regarding reality. Reality is a state of mind which opens doors

to a great deal of opinions and thoughts. Ontology may also be

goal based or biased or objective.

Some organizations deal with reality in a dissimilar way

than most organizations. There is always some concern about what

is actually “real” in terms of duties and rules of engagement.

Job tasks and mission statements change constantly. This tends to

prompt questions in some of the employees and they quickly search

for a way out the reality of their performance limits. Some may

tend to feel obligated and will go along with whatever the

majority until management changes the outcome. This causes

distress in the trustworthiness of the organizations work

policies. Management feels they can make up the rules as they go

because it is part of their job function. The leader changes

rules to gain his reason at the moment and anticipate the

employees to go along with it. Because he or she is in a

management position no one questions their rationale or judgment.

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It takes the courageous efforts of supervisors to seek to find

out the reality in rules. When the leader is accessible with the

information of what the rules are they usually say that they

didn’t say it. This weighs profoundly of what the employees are

agreeable to accept as good information.

Epistemology deals with how people acquire knowledge and how

they discern good knowledge from bad knowledge. It can be looked

at from either a positivist or interpretive point of view.

Positivists believe that individuals “can discover what truly

happens in organizations through the categorization and

scientific measurement of the behavior of people and systems”

(Hatch, 2006, p.13). From a Modernist point of view the way to

obtain good knowledge is to go through a process. People must

develop a hypothesis or proposition, gather data about those

ideas, analyze that data, and then test the hypothesis and

proposition that is represented in their data by what exists in

the external reality to see if they are right. On the other hand,

Symbolic-interpretive epistemology believes that individuals’

points of view are different in the culture of the organization.

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It also believes that an individual’s experiences and

recollection of situations cause them to react differently

according to what makes sense to that individual. Everyone has a

different understanding of what reality is and interprets is

differently.

The company must continue to take new concerns and forward

these concerns to the officials who are able to turn suggestions

into company policy. Making up the rules and instilling them in

employees in a single location creates inconsistency in the

operations of the company as a whole. The corporate officials

welcome ideas from the staff. They want to make the company

better for every customer and employee. It is not until everyone

comes together on one accord that the company will raise to the

next level. They must snuff out the individualism that starts in

the stores and strive to keep every store on the defined rules

and regulations.

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Modernism

A German sociologist, Max Weber, believed that

bureaucracies, staffed by bureaucrats, were an accurate

representation of an ideal organization. He based his model

bureaucracy on legal and absolute authority, logic, and order.

Weber's theories, and those of many others of that time,

reflected an impersonal attitude toward members of the

organization. The work force was regarded as a potential

detriment to the efficiency of any organization. Although these

theories are now considered mechanistic and outdated, Weber's

views on bureaucracy helped to envision important ideas of

process efficiency, division of labor, and authority. Weber’s

vision was taken to a higher efficiency through the study of

organizational planning.

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Another important founder/contributor to organization theory

in the early 1900s was Fayol. He identified strategic planning,

staff recruitment, employee motivation, and employee guidance as

the most vital management functions in laying the foundation for

a successful organization. Frederick W. Taylor wrote a book

entitled Principles of Scientific Management. He outlined his

ideas/theories and introduced them to factories. He was an

important factor in defining how training, wage incentives,

employee selection, and work standards increased overall

organizational performance (Taylor, 1911). Studies like these

placed emphasis on the importance of individual and group

interaction, humanistic management skills, and social

relationships in the workplace.

Until the late 1950s modernists assumed organizations were

considered as being closed systems with no external factors

affect them. The contingency theory of leadership states that

“the success of the leader is a function of various contingencies

in the form of subordinate, task, and/or group variables. The

success of a given examples of leader behavior is conditional

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upon the demands forced by the situation” (University of Twente,

2010). This theory was built on the fact that internal

restrictions of the organization as well as external limitations

of an organization influence the leadership’s success as well as

the success of the organization in the environment that it

resides (Robillard, 2001).

Modernists also assumed that the resources that are

obtainable to the organization affect its success as well. In the

1970s the work of Pfeffer and Salancik brought the resource

dependency theory to the modernist view. “What is being

interpreted is the organization’s external environment, and how

the organization goes about its interpretation depends on how

analyzable it perceives the environment to be and how actively it

intrudes into the environment to understand it.” (Choo, 1991).

The resources that are available to an organization pay a part in

its success. This theory took the element of control out of the

leaders hands and the organization and put it in the hands of the

environment. This theory is not highly regarded in the modernist

theory; its constraints and opposition to Darwin’s theory and the

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theory of “the survival of the fittest” weigh very heavily. The

environment must be regarded as a major player in the success of

the organization; failure to do so could lead to the demise of

its future.

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

1. uses images ("word pictures") and symbols as typical and

frequent literary techniques

2. uses colloquial language rather than formal language

3. uses language in a very self-conscious way, seeing

language as a technique for crafting the piece of

literature just as an artist crafts a piece of art like a

sculpture or a painting

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4. uses language as a special medium that influences what

that piece of literature can do or can be

5. saw the piece of literature as an object crafted by an

artist using particular techniques, crafts, skills

(recall how the Romantics thought the piece of literature

was a work of genius that somehow appears full-blown from

the imagination of the genius). Form, style, and

technique thus become as important--if not more so--than

content or substance.

6. often, the intention of writers in the Modern period is

to change the way readers see the world and to change our

understanding of what language is and does

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Postmodern Perspective:

One of the most popular French philosophers Bergson (1859-

1941) became of the cult authors of post-modernism and in this

perspective has been one of the key references in organization

and strategic management literature. His ideas theories are

factual and intriguing and can still contribute to research in

management beyond the post-modernist perspective. Post-modern

approaches are frequently considered fitting to difficult systems

(theories). For example, the key notion of emergence and method

philosophy are key references to outline difficulty (Letiche,

2000). Based on Bergson’s concepts/understanding of duration,

perception, the author proposes to re-evaluate organizational

change in a true process-based point of view, where, for example

‘‘situation interpretation and activity intermix’’ (Letiche,

2000) and where appearance becomes at the same time the focal

point and the tool for an action-oriented research.

As I stated earlier, Deleuze, (1991) was influential in re-

launching Bergson’s dreams. The thought of multiplicity and the

theory of time was acquired by postmodernist philosophers and

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transferred to post-modernist motivated social scientists,

management scholars included by Deleuze.

With this being said: Postmodern criticism is also important

because it suggest the guarantee of de-territorializing modernism

and removing its political, social, and cultural limitations,

while at the same time affirming political beliefs of racial,

gender, and ethnic distinction. In addition, postmodern criticism

does not merely challenge dominant Western cultural models with

their notion of convincing knowledge; it also situates us within

a world that has little likeness to the one that encouraged the

great narratives of Marx and Freud. Postmodern criticism

continues to bring awareness to the changing limitations related

to the control of the electronic mass media and information

technology, the shifting nature of class and social formations in

post-industrialized capitalist societies, and the rising

transgression of limitations between life and art, high and

popular culture, and image and reality. Postmodernism presents

itself as an evaluation of all forms of representations and

meanings that argue transcendental status. It discards general

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reason as a basis for human affairs, and acts as other forms of

knowing that are practical, historical, and social. In continued

reading, postmodernism points to a world in which the creation of

meaning has become as important as the creation of labor in

determining the limitations of human survival. In this view, how

we are constituted in language is no less important than how we

are constructed as subjects within relations of production.

Similarly, postmodernism serves to de-territorialize the map of

leading cultural understanding. That is, it discards the European

tradition as the elite referent for judging what constitutes

historical, cultural, and political truth. A postmodernism of

resistance feels that traditions should be appreciated for their

attempts to name the partial, the particular, and the specific;

in this view, traditions reveal the importance of constituting

history as an exchange of ideas among a range of voices as they

fight within relations of power. Customs are not valued for their

claims to truth or authority, but for the ways in which they

serve to liberate and enlarge human possibilities. Postmodernism

views the subject as conflicting and profound, and rejects the

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notion that individual consciousness and reason are the most

important determinants in shaping human history. Postmodernism

points to solidarity, community, and compassion as vital aspects

of how we develop and understand the capacities we have for

experiencing the world and ourselves in a meaningful way.

Postmodernism suggests alternatives for rethinking how we are

constituted as subjects within a fast shifting set of political,

social, and cultural conditions.

Characteristics of Post-Modernism in Literature

1. Whereas Modernism places faith in the ideas, values,

beliefs, culture, and norms of the West, Postmodernism

rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of

the human experience and often rejects such ideas, beliefs,

culture, and norms.

2. Whereas Modernism attempts to reveal profound truths of

experience and life, Postmodernism is suspicious of being

"profound" because such ideas are based on one particular

Western value systems.

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3. Whereas Modernism attempts to find depth and interior

meaning beneath the surface of objects and events,

Postmodernism prefers to dwell on the exterior image and

avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings

associated with the interior of objects and events.

4. Whereas Modernism focused on central themes and a united

vision in a particular piece of literature, Postmodernism

sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory,

ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished,

fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific

reality possible.  Therefore, it focuses on a vision of a

contradictory, fragmented, ambiguous, indeterminate,

unfinished, "jagged" world.

5. Whereas Modern authors guide and control the reader’s

response to their work, the Postmodern writer creates an

"open" work in which the reader must supply his own

connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his

own (unguided) interpretation.

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Symbolic Interpretivism:

Symbolic-interpretivist perspective also acknowledged as the

qualitative approach. A rule of the qualitative approach of the

symbolic-interpretivist viewpoint is that organizations are

communities that are socially constructed within everyday

communications. According to Hatch 2006, Strauss & Corbin, 1990)

“organizational behaviorist examine and study how people create

and give meaning to their own experiences in organizational life

to gain an understanding and a way to gain insight through

discovering meaning by improving their comprehension of the

whole.” Qualitative research explores the richness, depth, and

complexity of phenomena. Symbolic interpretivism is also an

ontological view whose principle is that humans cannot know an

external, or objective, experience apart from one’s own

understanding or perception of that phenomenon (Hatch & Cunliffe,

2007). Symbolic-interpretivists insist that humans create social

24

truth, a key factor that closely interrelates with Transformative

Teleology (Stacey et al., 2000). It continues to view knowledge

as relative to the persons that knows and therefore insists that

one-sided awareness and individual meaning is the path towards

understanding an organization. According to Weick, (1969),

symbolic-interpretivist perspective is the most widely recognized

theory. He continues to explain that people looking at

organizations create in it what they want to see within it.

People tend to act a particular way within organizations and

construct structures that were not there before took their

action. The symbolic-interpretivist perspective raises ones

perception of the organization to make it seem objective. With

that said this perspective recognizes that what we/one

understands about cultures, identities and environments is not

always real or touchable.

A comparison of the three perspectives relative to the

environment can be seen in the following diagram:

Perspectives

Environment Relationship

Modernis Environment lies outside the boundary of the

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t organization – perceived via the 5 senses Provides raw material/inputs Absorbs products & services Imposes constraints & requires adaptation– like niche, survival of the fittest in resource pool; variation & selection

Dependency and uncertainty Super system - Organization as subsystem (higher order contains the lower orders)

Boundary management - boundary spanning & buffering Isomorphism dynamically shapes the organization

Symbolic-Interpretivist

Socially constructed from shared beliefs and interpretations

Material consequences Environment is enacted by organization members Adaptation and conceptualized role – coercive, normative, and mimetic institutional pressures; Social legitimacy important

Post Modern

Problemtize the distinction organization vs. environment (ambiguous boundaries & virtual boundaries)

No justification for exploitation or imposition Avoid hegemony Language and communication are used to gain collective understanding

Table 1: OT Perspectives on Environmental Relationship –

adapted from Hatch (2006)

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Conclusion

The modernist tries to explain a part of reality while the

symbolic-interpretivist focuses on describing it and the

postmodernist pays attention to disapprove of or construct it.

(Hatch, 2006). Although each theory is unique in its own boundary

and may not be appropriate to all the setting, it appears that

absorbing these theories methodically could not only widen our

possibility but also help us to control organizations more

effectively. We understand what each of the organizational

perspectives is: Postmodernists trust that everything people know

is relative to the instant of our occurrence, which means that

there is no objectively social reality. Symbolic-interpretive

perspective focuses on the organization as a population

continuous by human relationships and uses a general ontology and

an interpretive epistemology, treating organizations as meanings

that are equally shaped and communicated. The modernist

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perspective focuses on the organization as a self-governing unit

and takes a positivist approach to producing knowledge. Modernist

organization theorists know how to precede effectiveness, success

and other objective indicators of performance through the purpose

of theories linking to structure and control. In the end … Each

perspective has its own advantages and disadvantages. Although

the points of view of the modernist and postmodern theories

closely match the statutes of the company, it cannot totally

abandon either of them. The company utilizes more of the

modernist views than the other two views. They rely very heavily

on what has been working for this organization and others before

them to conduct business. They can change their business

practices and, to some degree, change the way the environment

reacts to them. Since they were the first in this particular

niche of the market they do have the power to set the pattern for

the others to follow. Alongside these thoughts, the company must

change to make the consumers happy. The must listen to the

stakeholders to find what is important and change business

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practices to meet those needs. This is why the modernist theory

alongside the postmodern theory is the best perspective.

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