Page 145 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 8 ■ Sustaining organizational effectiveness
and acquisition of material wealth. It goes without saying that these are not
man’s highest ends; and that rationality is not confined to the economic sphere.
Rationality is a way of doing things: the application of the principles of rational-
ism to action, rationalism being defined as the doctrine that the universe of per-
ception and experience can be understood in terms of thought or reason, as
against emotion, intuition or extrasensory modes of apprehension.
We accept the means–end definition of rationality; however, we depart from
Landes’ equation of rationality and the doctrine of rationalism. We need to rec-
ognize the limitations of the individual. We cannot pretend that men and
women do not use intuition as well as empiricism. Some may use one or the
other to a lesser or greater extent – but not at all? We doubt that. We tend towards
Weick’s position on this point.
The notion that political models of organization represent an attack on
rational models needs careful analysis. Close examination of alternative
modes of decision making proposed by Pfeffer (1981) makes this point clear.
He compares rational, bureaucratic, decision process/organized anarchy and
political power models. For rational decision making the ideology is seen as
‘efficiency and effectiveness’; for political power the ideology is ‘struggle, con-
flict, winners and losers’. Decisions from the former flow from ‘value maxi-
mizing choice’, from the latter from the result of ‘bargaining and interplay
among interests’, but this is hardly a satisfactory distinction. We must ask
what it is that the ‘interests’ bargain over. Definitions of appropriate action,
policies, means–ends sequences and strategies will form the calculus of any
answer to this question. By saying that the political power model demands the
analysis of interests we immediately adopt a rational model – at the level of
the interests themselves. Thus this model differs from the rational model only
in that the proponents of the rational model are seen to model choice in
essentially unproblematical terms. But Bryman (1983) makes it entirely clear
that only proponents of the ‘hard’ version of rationality could be accused of
that. Thus the apparent difference collapses in all but the most extreme of jux-
tapositions. We conclude that the extreme or ‘hard’ definition has never had
much application for those concerned with the management of organizations.

(In parenthesis, it is worth noting the growing number of studies examining
the work of F.W. Taylor which cast doubt on whether or not Taylor, for one,
ever believed in such a straightforward view – see Rose (1975) and Merkle
(1980).) However, by distinguishing ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ rationalities Bryman
seems tacitly to admit that the latter is not properly ‘rational’. Here he appears
to be following Landes, equating rationality with rationalism. To do so is to
adopt too limited a view of rationality. The concept of multiple rationalities
does not imply a ‘softer or weaker’ view. Ill-understood it may be, but we
believe it is possible to establish, empirically, rationalities in use.
If we accept that people attempt to make sense of the confusion of the world
as they experience it and that they do so by employing a particular rationality, then
to understand their attempts so to do we must understand the rationality in use.
Moreover, if we are to understand the confusing talk we often hear when prob-
lems are under discussion we need to understand the different rationalities and
the nature of the contradictions between them.

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