THE GHOSTS OF TIME PAST IN ORGANIZATION THEORY

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Stewart Clegg

• THE GHOSTS OF TIME PAST IN ORGANIZATION THEORY

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STRUCTURE OF PRESENTATION

• Prolegomenon
• Positive power
• Negative power
• Power, time and organizations
• Thoughts on science
• Measuring time and motion
• Against systematic soldiering
• Schmidt exemplar of a technology for the melting
  pot
• Handling materials
• The political economy of the body
• Efficiency at work
• Representing power and the body
• Power and the moving line
• The slaughterhouse
• Ford and the sociological department
• Highway 61, urban blues, and moral panics
• Conclusion

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PROLEGOMENON

• Central relation of time power through
  causality
• Problematic aspects of powers temporality
• Science time reckoning
• Time past when the rot set in

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POWER

• Power concerns the ways that social relations
  shape capabilities, decisions, change these
  social relations can do things and they can block
  things unfolding power is ultimately about the
  choices that we make, the actions we take, the
  evils we tolerate, the goods we define, the
  privileges we bestow, the rights we claim, and
  the wrongs we do. Power means finding the most
  effective leverage for particular relations.
• Processes and relations not outcomes.
• Time dependence of an outcomes view
• The case of African colonization
• Retrospectivity and prospectivity

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POWER, TIME AND ORGANIZATIONS

• Thoughts on (organization) science
• Neglect of power
• Partly due its trivialization through a
  metaphysics of causality and related
  power/knowledge regimes
• The institutionalization of these in a
  utilitarian regime, together with the
  marginalization of older traditions of
  scholarship
• Neglect of historical sciences
• Neglect of the reflexive analysis of truth
  production

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TIME PAST

• Power and organization theory
• A post-war science?
• A post-war machinery of truth production
• Back to basics
• A practice of power without its theorization as
  such
• (Truth production obscures and illuminates)
• The creation of a new type of human subject as a
  utilitarian project riddled with power at every
  turn
• The purity of power consisted in its eternal
  return as repetition, the same routine

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MEASURING TIME AND MOTION

• Timing and redesign
• The critical role of the stopwatch (and film)
• Empirical examination
• Re-division of labour
• Individual competition
• A battle against idling hands
• Authoritative time and body settings
• Selection and training as technologies of power
• A battle against limited English language
  competency
• Schmidt and trained gorillas
• A battle against particularism
• Handling coal

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POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE BODY

• Taking matters out of the hands (of hands)
• Linking efficiency to power through the medium of
  the human body
• Anatomical politics
• Bio politics
• Social politics
• Taylorism represented a working out of Cartesian
  dualism as a social relation
• Hands vs. heads/body vs. mind
• Social relation mediated through
• Politics, economics and technologies

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REPRESENTING POWER AND THE BODY

• From the slaughterhouse
• Upton Sinclairs The Jungle
• Ethnographic sociology
• To the production line
• Chicago sociology
• Survey sociology with a normative and
  prescriptive twist
• To the social production of ethnicity
• Moral panics
• Blackness and vices
• Jazz, booze and reefer madness
• To social inscription writ large
• Prohibition and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937

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POWER SHIFTS

• From
• the working body ... to the social collective
  body
• the creation of normalcy to the irruption of
  deviancy
• the centre of working life to its margins
• The physical to the moral shaping of the body
• The hand to the productive and consuming self
• Underlying these shifts
• Shifts in time focus
• From cons/re/training the individual at work
  towards re-shaping the totality of time that the
  individual spent

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CONCLUSION

• OT came to concentrate on the here-and-now with
  little conception of the where-or-when or
  why-and-how it had been constituted as it was.
• The inability to see power at work in shaping
  time and the body in a utilitarian pact meant
  that it came to see power only in system terms of
  functions
• To wit the whole power/uncertainty stream
  strategic contingencies theory resource
  dependence theory, etc.
• The eclipse of time meant the subjugation of
  power.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE

• Stewart Clegg, David Courpasson and Nelson
  Phillips,
• Power and Organizations
• Thousand Oaks, CA Sage.
• http//www.sagepub.co.uk/booksProdDesc.nav?prodId
  Book225763