Project description
The Departmentality of Self-Organising Systems –
a Historical Sociology of Organisation
By Gorm Harste, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, [email protected]
Organisation theories normally date their origin back to the first decades of the 20th century. Weber
described his pure ideal type of bureaucracy just before the First World War, Henri Fayol described
French control and command and Frederick Taylor describe what is later known as taylorism at
those assembly lines that got their heyday in arms production during the First World War (Morgan
1986; Clegg 1990; Perrow 1970; Luhmann 2000). Though, Weber himself and Foucault too
described organisation way back. Weber‟s contemporary historicist and sociologist Otto Hintze
elaborated penetrating studies of administration, centralisation departments and the origin of the
modern ministerial system way back over centuries of absolutist rule and into the high medieval era
(Hintze 1962; 1975). Accordingly scholars today are led to suggest that organisation very well
could be an old phenomenon while organisation theory is a very recent phenomenon.
During the 1980‟ies when the conceptions of “organisational culture” was at the
frontline of organisational research several authors found that such a conception should be studied
with the use of anthropological studies of Bali culture or the Japanese Confucian legacy. Hence we
might tend to believe that there is no such thing as a legacy of European organisational culture and
even more absurdly that European organisations and administrations developed without the slightest
idea about who they were, why they did what they did, which concepts and organisation codes they
used, how they communicated and which communication ideas they should use. This is complete of
the record and organisation theory has been misled in about every sense possible with such kinds of
non-sense (Harste 1994; 1997).
The problem is to trace the historical record of those path-dependencies that
throughout hundreds of years have decided the decision-making premises of modern organisational
systems. When and how, about what and with whom were the organisational forms known today
established? What were the membership codes, the codes of inclusion/exclusion, of hierarchy, of
communicational decision-making? How did coordination and synchronisation, temporalisation and
division of labour emerge? How was organisational semantics and modern world-views influenced
by these developments?
In fact, Niklas Luhmann in his penetrating studies on historical semantics over and
over describes organisation semantics and even more to the point organisational self-descriptions
(Luhmann 1989: 67-132; 1997: 813-847). In Table 1, I have listed a number such self-descriptions
during the state-formation period, many of them analysed by Luhmann himself. Foucault too
analyses such texts. Nevertheless Luhmann in his magisterial final work in organisational sociology
did not trace organisational theories further back than to the usual suspects, Weber, Fayol and
Taylor (Luhmann 2000: chap. 1). And Foucault does not make organisational theory at all;
sometimes proponents of Foucauldian analyses even tend to forget that Foucault did not analyse our
contemporary society but mainly the 17th and 18th centuries (Foucault 1975; 1976; 1997; 2004).
Even more to the troubles, Foucault did not with a single word refer to his main empirical case that
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stays closed into a French iron house of common knowledge – to every well educated French
scholar: The Colbert construction of central administration under Louis XIV during the period
1660-1680 and the years that followed (Colbert 1873; Harste 2003). This was what Alexis
Tocqueville called a “revolution administrative” that preceded the French Revolution. And Weber?
He did not refer to his sources in his posthumously published Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Weber
1980 [1922]). Probably Prussian administration was his main subject while his use of French
administrative history is very unclear.
One reason for the general disproportion in organisation studies could very well be
that the Anglo-Saxon studies of management and organisation have dominated social research since
more than half a century. But English organisational history is peculiar in the sense that England did
not have only a small administration as Weber and Hintze thought, but what England have not had
was any kind of outstanding track of organisational self-descriptions comparable to what is known
from the central administrations in Germany, France, Spain and the high medieval church. English
organisational history is amazingly non-reflexive the whole way up to the aftermath of their
Blitzkrieg experience. And then a veritable explosion of afterthought took place.
On the continent organisation theories of corporate spirit, esprit de corps and corpus
spiritus can be traced back well into the 12th century (Salisbury 1993 [1159]; Marsilius 2001 [1326]
Kantorowicz 1957; Quillet 1972; Rossum & Böckenförde 1978). The invention of organisation and
organisation theory was dominated by the concerns of the church during the high medieval era.
From that period we have conceptions and theories of hierarchy, centralisation and decentralisation,
membership, merits, individual inclusion and exclusion, communication and excommunication,
networks, credibility, honour and prestige, corporate spirit and corporate identity, partnership, parts
and wholes, functional differentiation, departments and so on. Later on decision-making was put
more to the fore in the 16th century and a still stronger post-confessional secularisation of the many
theological concepts was undertaken from 1516 (Machiavelli) over Bodin to Fredrick the Great in
the heydays of Enlightenment.
What does this (hi)story mean? What does it signify? Which impact and path-dependency does it
have?
First, it describes the forms irritated whenever we make organisational reforms: Do
reforms and reorganisation scratch at the surface of our culture or do we give a push to deep
structures conditioning our comprehensive self-understanding and self-reflexion? We shall not
forget that the whole Enlightenment era was through and through an époque of reforms, reforms
and reforms all over and in every detail to the very reorganisation of what it does mean to be a
human being and to have a mind. “Reorganisationfever” was a key work from that period and our
whole culture, i.e. our forms of communication and reflexions about communication has already
learned what it does mean to reform and reorganise.
Furthermore we shall not forget that the conceptual history of “organisation” is not
about biological organs and organisms, bodies and corps, but about theology and partaking in the
Christian body of Jesus; the Eucharist was the first and most penetrating model of what it does
signify to make a meeting, to communicate in such a meeting, to delegate and discipline, and to
have a leader.
Third, in the European state, such ideas, conceptions and models were spread all over.
They were copied and imitated from one part of Europe to the other part. In the beginning by the
Church and later on, after the 16th century by the extreme military competition and that means a
forced and permanent reorganisation of military capabilities where enemies copied the innovations
of each other. This paved the way for the organisational record Europe offered as a heritage to the
modern world.
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Apart of some overall descriptions of the project (Harste 2010a; 2010b), in a number
of articles I have now traced the history of organisation and organisational theories in a time span
reaching from 1500-1900. In principle I try to get organisational self-descriptions from more or less
every decade. From about 1050-1500 the descriptions are more dispersed.
Table 1. Central self-descriptions in conceptual history of organisation: Structural
differentiations and semantic distinctions
Year
Author
Title
Theme
Contribution
Claude de
La monarchie en France
Beskrivelse af det
Første beskrivelse af
1515
Seyssel
kollektive
beslutningssystem
Beskrivelse af kongens
208 kompetencer
Analyse af
magtapparatet, kongens
suverænitet og dets
embedsmænd
Beskrivelse af
embedsmænd
Catalogus Gloriae Mundi
1576
Barthélemy de
Chasseneux
Jean Bodin
1609
Charles Loyseau
Traité des offices
1631
Cardin Le Bret
La souveraineté du roi
Beskrivelse af Staten
1651
Herman Conring
De ratione status
16641683
Jean-Baptiste
Colbert
Les instructions pour les
Commissaires
Beskrivelse af
geheimstatens
embedsmandsdyder
Beskrivelse af
embedsmænds opgaver
1695
Gottfried
Leibniz
Système nouveau
Teoretisk beskrivelse af
et organisationssystem
1693 –
1715
1722
Henri-François
d‟Aguesseau
22 Discours, Mercuriales
Departementalisering
Frederik
Wilhelm I
Frederik den
Store
Verwaltungsinstruktion
1777
Frederik den
Store
Essai de devoirs du prince
et du gouvernement
Forvaltningssystemet i
Preussen
Beskrivelse af den
preussiske stats
muligheder
Beslutnings- og
forvaltningsetik
1806-8
Karl von Stein,
Karl von
Hardenberg m.fl
Denkschrifte
Preussens
ministerialsystem
1821
G.W.F.Hegel
Grundlinien der
Philosophie des Rechts
Statens indre forfatning
og dens
rationalitetspotentiale
1529
1752
Les six livres de la
république
Das politische Testament
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beføjelser hos kronens
beslutningstagere
Kataloglæren om beføjelser
Fremstilling af
magtapparatets suverænitet
og stabilitet
Første beskrivelse, der
holder sig til
embedsmændene
Abstraktionsforhøjelse i
beskrivelse af staten
Beskrivelse af statens
lukning af selviagttagelse
Fremstilling af
centralt/perifert
iagttagelsessystem
Uddifferentiering af
organisationssystemers
rationalitet
Magtdelingen
ret/forvaltning
Departementsopdeling
kodificeres
Fremstilling af kongen som
statens tjener og som enhed
i staten
Universalistiske principper
for et differentieret
beslutnings- og
funktionssystem
Ministerialsystemets
endelige udformning,
ministeransvarlighed, vs
demokratisering nedefra
Den første færdige
bureaukratiteori
References
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