Negotiated Orders and Organizational Cultures

Abstract

Negotiated order and organizational culture represent two of the major recent approaches to the study of organizational life. Both of them focus on the actor's perspective on life in an organization, and they are complementary, even though they have rarely been brought together. They emphasize worker satis faction and commitment and the noneconomic, nonrational working of orga nizations. Proponents of both perspectives also stress that members (and organizations) must take into account the constraints of their social and physi cal environments. In examining the connections between these two approaches, this chapter discusses how they treat socialization, power, con flict, and interorganizational relations and how they are applied to organiza tional problems. 239

For love and money: Organizations’ creative responses to multiple environmental logics

“…Although new institutionalism deserves credit for departing from rationalist assumptions of resource dependency and contingency theory, critics find the approach lacking in a few critical respects (Fine 1984;Hirsch and Lounsbury 1997;Scully and Segal 2002;Hallett and Ventresca 2006a,b). By prioritizing the institutional logics that get carried into organizations by script-following actors, new institutionalism has a view of action that deprives people of generative creativity in their responses to their environments.…”

“…Reaching back to the symbolic interactionist tradition in the work/occupations and organizational subfields (Gouldner 1954;Blumer 1969), contemporary authors are combining key insights of both the new and "old" institutionalisms to reorient organizational studies toward the understanding that "while institutional logics carry meaning, it is also true that meaning arises through social interaction" in concrete settings (Hallett and Ventresca 2006b, p.213). Organizations are not merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics "out there" (including technical rational logics), where workers seamlessly enact preconscious scripts valorized in the institutional environment (Fine 1984;Lounsbury et al 2003). Instead, they are places where people and groups (agentic actors, not "institutional dopes") make sense of, and interpret, institutional "vocabularies of motive" (Fligstein 1997), and act on those interpretations-the central premise of symbolic interactionism.…”

Integrative Process in Manager–Employee Negotiations: Relational and Structural Factors

“…A critical point in the negotiated order perspective is that formal rules and structures do not determine individual action so much as they provide constraint and context as members reconfigure patterns of behavior with others in the work environment (Corbin & Strauss, 1993;Fine, 1984). In a social system, each negotiation is contextually bound by ''structural properties entering very directly as conditions into the course of the negotiation itself '' (Strauss, 1978, p. 99, original emphasis).…”

Managerial Responsibility as Negotiated Order: A Social Construction Perspective

“…In the 1970s, he formalized the concept of negotiated order theory after studying collective work processes in several hospitals (Strauss 1978;Strauss et al 1963). The theory is based on previous study developed by Chicago School sociologists, such as Mead (1929), Hughes (1958), Dalton (1959) and Goffman (1961) (for an overview, see Fine 1984). Symbolic interactionism ran counter to the functionalist epistemology dominant in American sociology at the time.…”