Martin Henry
KRIS ASTAPHAN has resigned as deputy chairman of the National Commercial Bank (NCB). The bank will roll on without him. The Barclay's Bank roots of the NCB go back to 1690 in the goldsmith business in London. Mr. Patterson is taking forever to resign; the PNP will roll on without him when he does, as the JLP is doing without Mr. Seaga. For the first time since its founding in 1834, The Gleaner is doing without an Ashenheim on its board, as Richard Ashenheim goes off to live in Bermuda. The institution rolls on.
Organisations assume a life of their own. Nowadays most of us live and move and have our being in an elaborate network of organisations dominated by the one we work for.
But what are these organisations which define our lives like?
Gareth Morgan's book, Images of Organisation, provides fascinating and powerful metaphors for "reading and understanding organisational life." Morgan, born in Wales, is now an organisational theorist at York University in Canada. The book is, not surprisingly, directed to managers. But rank-and-file workers who struggle with tensions over organisational life and the alienation, which Marx said was characteristic of the capitalist organisation of work, can learn a lot from it.
The first Morgan metaphor is quite familiar: Organisations as machines, which rumble on to their own bureaucratic logic. Work is routinised and can be very mechanical and repetitive. Employees are expected to behave as if they are parts of machines.
'KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY'
More positively, organisations may be compared to organisms interacting with their environment, or as brains capable of learning and self-organisation through information processing. But the brain/learning metaphor is mostly looking to the future to what Peter Drucker calls the 'knowledge economy' where human intelligence, creativity, and insight are the key resources.
We are more familiar with the metaphor of the organization as culture. A fascinating insight is the similarity between the decision-making process using statistics in organisations and magic and divination in tribal societies! "Many of the uses of statistics have much in common with the use of magic."
Organisations are political systems; and they are also psychic prisons! In these political systems it is not unusual for rights as a citizen in a democracy and functions as a paid employee, to clash. The employee is expected to keep his mouth shut, do what he is told, and submit to the will of his superior. He is expected to forget about democracy and get on with his work - or vote with his feet. And we are all familiar with 'company politics', which the Morgan metaphor says is not an aberration but an integral part of organizational life, as politics in the wider society.
As psychic prisons, organisations assume an existence and power of their own that allow them to exercise control over their creators. "Human beings have a knack of getting trapped in webs of their own creation." This powerful psychological metaphor, which resonates well with me, goes on to say, favoured ways of thinking [groupthink] and acting become traps that confine individuals.
BALANCING THE PARADOXES
Organisations are flux and transformation, and never more so than now. Balancing the paradoxes of change and continuity, innovation and regulation, collaboration and competition, control and flexibility can be unnerving particularly for the least powerful in organisations.
The concluding Morgan metaphor looks at The Ugly Face [of] Organisations as Instruments of Domination. "Our organisations are killing us!" "Throughout history, organisation has been associated with processes of social domination where individual or groups find ways of imposing their will on others. Domination in the modern organisation may be an unintended consequence of an otherwise rational system of activity to advance a particular set of goals. But the consequence is no less real or destructive to individuals, the environment, and the society.
The metaphors, like all other metaphors, have their strengths and weaknesses but each gives us powerful insights into the organisations with which we have to deal as defining features of our modern over-organised lives.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
