Co-hosted with The Centre for Work, Organisation and Society, Essex Business School.

Organization (Theory) as A Way of Life: notes on the continuing significance of the ‘classical stance’ for analysing and performing organisation

Abstract: To the extent that ‘classical organization theory’ is seen to possess any enduring interest it is mainly as a historic artefact. In contrast to this customary view, the paper seeks to indicate the continuing significance of classical organization theory, for both analysing and intervening in contemporary organizational life. In making this case, I begin by reconstructing conventional understanding of this received term by suggesting that classical organization theory should be viewed less as  ‘theory’ in the conventional sense, and rather as a geographically dispersed, institutionally disconnected, and historically discontinuous ‘stance’, characterised, inter alia, by a pragmatist call to experience, an antithetical attitude to ‘high’ or transcendental theorising, and, not least, an ethical focus on organizational effectiveness born of a close connection to ‘the work itself’ or ‘the situation at hand’. Deploying the term ‘classic organization theory’ in this way, to refer to a stance, attitude or comportment, and an associated persona that bears it, we are able to highlight the significant differences between this comportment and the increasingly ‘metaphysical’ attitude characterising many contemporary approaches to organization and organizing, not simply in organization studies, but also in sociology.

Paul du Gay is Globaliseringsprofessor in the Department of Organization (IOA) at Copenhagen Business School, and Academic Director of the school’s Business in Society Public-Private Platform. His publications include In Praise of Bureaucracy (2000), The Values of Bureaucracy (ed. 2005), Organizing Identity: Persons and Organizations After Theory¹ (2007), and Conduct (eds. with E.McFall & S.Carter, 2008). New Spirits of Capitalism? Crises, Justifications and Dynamics (eds. with Glenn Morgan) was recently published by OUP. He is currently working on a book for Routledge, For State Service: Office as a Vocation.

At CBS he co-directs the Velux Foundation research programme ‘What Makes Organization? Resuscitating Organizational Theory/Re-Vitalising Organizational Life’ with Signe Vikkelsø.

All are welcome to attend this seminar which is followed by a reception at 5.30pm in the Sociology Common Room.