Organisational Structuration: Emergent Social Action In Committee Work

Abstract

The concept of structuration is still under construction. After tracking its development to date, this paper asks what happens to the concept when it is applied to understanding work behaviour in an organisational context. The concept of structuration is made more elaborate by introducing a new constituent to the process, the element of preferential role. What influence, if any do the actuations of preferential roles by individuals have on the social structure and of the collective group behaviour? The paper serves as a model for anyone who seeks ways of testing the concept of structuration in practice. The research reported in this paper suggests an answer to a practical question thrown up by the concept of structuration. Structuration is one way of resolving the opposition between those collectivists who seek to observe structure as a determinate of individual behaviour and those individualists who see group behaviour as nothing more than the sum total of individual behaviours. Anthony Giddens, who is generally credited with the formulation of the concept, provides little instruction on how to actually operationalise the concept of structuration in an empirical investigation. Great in theory; how is it studied in practice? Moreover, how can the concept be put to work in understanding the social organisation of work and its outcomes? After sketching the development of the concept of structuration, this paper reports on one attempt to study structuration as it occurs in a work setting (a house of parliament) that has particular characteristics that make it ideal for the observation of structuration in action. The unit of work that is studied is the parliamentary committee. A single parliamentary inquiry provides a unit of work to observe, which is at once discrete and well bounded and also has a wider institutional context within which the committee fits. It also provides people to study who are both political actors (in the sense prescribed by political science) and social actors (in the sense prescribed by sociology). The parliamentary committee is an ideal group to choose to test the influence of preferential role and structuration, since it is here that structuration can be observed in a highly explicit form. Parliamentarians are not wage slaves, limited by official role descriptions and duty statements. They are out to shape structures in ways that can assist individual agendas and are expected to some extent to construct their own roles. That said, the parliamentary committee is also a work group, the structure of which is at least in theory determined by collective agreement. Nine parliamentary committees were studied in this project. Two of those committees are cased in this paper. However, in all cases observed, structuration occurred through the interaction of two pervasive sets of forces: the corporatist dictates of party structures and the actuation of the preferential roles of committee members. The development of the concept lthough Anthony Giddens is generally accredited with introducing the concept and/or its ownership, (see for example Edwards 2000; Sarker 2001; Udo and Sydow 2002;) the ideas behind structuration can arguably be traced back to Derrida‟s undermining of the traditional sociological certainty that social structure is fixed. This certainty implies that the only proper point to be studied is the way in which social structure reproduces itself, not the way in which it mutates. Derrida‟s interest in subversion through the A International Business & Economics Research Journal Volume 3, Number 9 34 undermining of hierarchy envisages a quality of “structurality.” (Derrida 1978) As a quality subject to subversive action structurality is a variable. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “habitas” is useful in the study of political behaviour, because it treats social life as a game wherein interests compete. Actors who compete within the game must start with an appreciation of the rules. This is the position or habitas within which development to the social structure occurs as actors practice different tactics to establish competitive positioning. (Bourdieu 1981). Giddens goes onto to postulate a duality of structure and agency where each exists within the other. This is a closer identity between structure and agency than a simple mutual dependence or mutual causality. Social action exists within the rules of the game, but variations in practice change the rules, and the new rules become the context for future action. Giddens (1984) major contribution is to begin to outline the dynamics of the social process that sees actors having an impact on the structure of the collective as they create the social dynamics within which they operate. He has elaborated the concept as manifest in two variables, the pattern of the consumption of resources and the attribution of status by individuals to other individuals and groups. Human activity in consumption of resources and in the attribution of status generates structure as much as structure creates and shapes human activity. This is a less dismal sociology, where individuals are not always the unwitting subjects of social forces, condemned to value and behave in the same predictable ways, unaware of the guiding social forces that direct them. “All social actors, no matter how lowly, have some degree of penetration of the social forms which oppress them.” (Giddens 1979, 73). However, Giddens stops well short of creating a picture of the Machiavellian puppet master who can engineer particular social forces to achieve particular purposes. He sees actors as unable to directly intervene to make predetermined changes to structure, but pushes the focus of observation onto the unintended consequences of social action (Giddens 1990) In order to study structuration by means of observation, we need to identify an observable manifestation of structuration in action. The chosen unit of analysis then becomes the interaction between members of s social unit at work. The concept of interaction has perhaps been most developed by Goffman (1963, 1967 and 1969). The unit of analysis here is what Goffman calls the „encounter.‟ In this case two encounters present themselves for attention, the formalised behaviour of the committee in public session and the perhaps even more formalised behaviour of the MP during interview. Both can be subjected to interpretive analysis. The interactions can be presented as data and their symbolic meaning can be extracted. In addition, collective behaviour can be analysed as an artefact of social organisation and collective culture.