Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations
Citation: Stewart Clegg (1999) Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations. Modern organizations: organization studies in the postmodern world (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations
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Summary
In this chapter, Clegg describes a series of perspectives on organizations, detailing their advantages, flaws, relationship to one another, and the evidence supporting them. He opens with a discussion of the population ecology perspective, explaining the metaphor mapping biological notions of ecology to organizational notions of ecology, and the market-oriented competitiveness perspective that underlies both. As he explains, the metaphor does not necessarily account for important observed features of organizations, such as the ability to change the environment, the migration of people among entities, and the fundamentally unconscious nature of organizations. One alternative to the ecological perspective is the institutionalist, where organization leaders devise strategies to support their own competitiveness and perpetuate themselves. Clegg goes on to describe the ``power" perspective, considering how power relationships inside an organization He goes on to explain what this perspective predicts about organizational structures and survival relative to environmental/market conditions: e.g. a business cycle of consolidation, expansion, contraction, a historical relationship of different configurations of power among actors. He concludes that organizations are composed of an ``interpenetration" of power, institutions, and efficiency components (i.e. the three perspectives outlined in the chapter) but that empirical evidence seems strongest when informed heavily by power and institutional perspectives. He says ``there clearly is no single iron cage of bureaucracy" -- multiple organizational forms are viable and the status quo is constructed, rather than inevitable.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
This chapter offers a dense but seemingly thorough overview to a series of debates about the most generative theoretical perspectives one might take in analyzing organizations.
