Soziologie - Sociology in the German-Speaking World by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, European General, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781350150492
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

3 Theoretical Issues and Organizational Types

In more recent publications, theoretical contributions have served primarily to indicate one’s standpoint (Apelt and Wilkesmann, 2015) or as introductions to the subject matter (Kühl, 2011; Tacke and Drepper, 2018). In addition, there have been remarkable attempts to contribute to the advancement of general theories of organization. One example is Thomas Matys’ study (2011) in the vein of the sociology of domination, which makes explicit reference to classics such as Karl Marx and Max Weber. His historical study, on the United States, deals with a central theme of James Coleman, namely, the debate over the legal status of organizations.

Another example of theoretically oriented work is “Operativität und Typik” (Operativity and Typology) by Thomas Drepper (2017). Drawing on systems-theoretical and neo-institutionalist approaches, the author’s main intention is to focus on organizations as entities that process meaning and to use this focus to explore issues concerning the typification of behavior, participants, and situations. The important aspect here is that, according to Drepper, typifications emerge from organizational sense-making and cannot be imposed from the outside. The primary starting point of his theoretical discussion is what he refers to as the post-rationalist “meta-narrative of recent organizational research” (2017: 5), which he draws on by reference to basic concepts such as cognition, semantics, diffusion, and translation. Drepper’s most important achievement is that he succeeds in linking his extremely stringent concept of organization to current theoretical debates in organizational research; this extends to the debate around the materiality of organizations, which the author discusses under the rubric of “(self‐)embodiments.” In building his argument, he vividly draws on “the world out there”―which is the ultimate object of social-scientific research. That is to say, he always finds illustrative examples to underpin his reasoning, but this does not (yet) amount to turning organizational sense-making into an object of systematic and methodically controlled research, on the basis of which his propositions could be verified or falsified.

Drepper’s focus on organizational sense-making and typification of organizations is important not least given the predictable tendency, owing to the growth of organizational sociology, toward differentiating between different types of organizations (see also Apelt and Tacke, 2012). In contrast to Drepper (2017), this trend is characterized by apodictic distinctions based on which attention is directed to problems that are unique to certain organizations, such as volunteer work in the case of non-profit organizations, and are absent in other types of organizations. Similar applies to universities, which, as professionally dominated organizations, combine research and educational tasks. Other organizations—such as associations or political parties—or those that represent more hybrid forms of different types of organizations are likewise characterized by special features (Laux, 2016; Bohmann and Laux, 2017). Often, the approach of these studies is to work out the specifics of the type of organization in question and to identify differences to what is presumed to represent the standard model, with companies mostly being regarded as the norm in this day and age. Against this background, a study by Sven Kette deserves particular attention, as it aims to describe companies as a specific type of organization as well (Kette, 2018).

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