Saturday 12 May 2018

The Social Construction of Organisations

One of the more challenging ideas I encountered when I was studying was 'social construction'.

Social Construction was an idea that came from a pair of sociologists (Berger and Luckman) and, as I understand it now, is actually quite simple. The idea is simply that most of the things around us are products of human behaviour - and this extends to abstracts: things like 'money', 'law', 'jobs', and, most relevantly for me given what I was studying, 'organisations'. The process by which this happens is a little more complex: knowledge gets interwoven into a degree of shared understanding and behaviour. But even that isn't actually that hard to understand. The coins in my pocket are worth a certain amount because I believe they are and when I go into a shop tomorrow and hand them the coins, they'll believe it too - and let me buy some coffee with them.

So why did I find this idea so hard to get my head around - such a challenge? I can think of three reasons.

The first is because I tended to confuse materialism with objectivism. Materialism is the idea that material things are the essence of all things (and a rejection of the notion that things exist outside of material world - specifically, a rejection of Cartesian dualism: my mind is not separate from or independent of my body). Objectivism is the idea that things exist independently of human perception. They're not the same thing, but I didn't really know that! Social Construction sits right in the middle of that difference: it argues that the material artefacts of society are a products of human behaviour, which, in turn, is a product of human perception.

The second is that language of social construction tended towards obfuscation. The original 1966 book is wonderfully written; it's dense: but necessarily so as it deals with complex ideas. However, much of the surrounding writing was that worst kind of academic writing - this was around the same time of the Bad Writing Awards.

The final reason, which is a consequence of the first two is is seemed anti-empirical: "How can you measure it?" Ironically, once of the foundations of my field - The Hawthorne Studies - is easy to interpret as an example of the same mechanisms as social construction. In these studies, workers were split into two groups; one was left in normal working conditions, the other were exposed to a variety of experimental conditions. The group exposed to the experimental conditions saw increases in productivity - even when those change should have made things worse (e.g. both lower and raising the lighting levels improve productivity). There are competing interpretations as to exactly why this happened, but the simple fact is behaviour (of the scientists) had a material effect on the productivity of the organisation.

Funnily enough, this idea that I so resisted became the core of the findings from my Ph.D.

(If you want to read Berger and Luckman, you can download the PDF here).

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