Soft Constraint. Liberal Organizations and Domination

Citation

Bobo, C. (2007), "Soft Constraint. Liberal Organizations and Domination", Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 328-330. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710825505

The author is Professor of Organizational Sociology at EM Lyon Business School and Co‐editor of Organization Studies.

The Soft Constraint was first published in French in 2000. “The book tries to combine a critical approach of management with a dynamic view of domination and oligarchic mechanisms. It is situated in the long line of classical organisational and political sociology” (p. 5). The object of the book is to analyze the means by which the managers succeed today in making their staff obey, an attempt to understand why people accept despotism as a dominant form of government of contemporary enterprises. The book contains eight chapters. The first four are a complete discussion about the concept of domination, discussion that conducts to Chapters 5 and 6 that are the empirical part of the book and are theoretically synthesized in Chapter 7. On that basis, the chapters eight develop Courpasson's a sociological theory of liberal management.

On the basis of a historical review of authors (such as Bendix, Taylor, Barnard, Simon and Perrow), the first chapter (The Anglo‐Saxon heritage. Defence of the bureaucracy) aims to show the importance of recurrent question of domination that is largely ignored by today organizational sociology. This chapter defends the idea that in spite of the theoretical appearances (such as co‐operation promoted by Barnard), the “management have ultimately deviated very little from their initial aim of seeking efficiency through domination and control” (p. 24). Chapter 2 (The rejection of the determinism) reviews authors, who are mostly French, who are opposed to the idea of domination in the organization. Whatever the concept used – organized action (Friedberg), joint regulation (Reynaud), institutional firm (Sainsaulieu) the organization is viewed as a place “where negotiations take place continually to reach agreements between actors” (p. 40). The chapter presents the Crozierian theory of action in organization, then the sociological institutionalist approach of organization that replaces the question of power by that of methods of interaction between firm and society. The third stream replaces the concept of organization by the concept of (managerial) enterprise. The ultimate objective of this chapter is to promote the need of renewed approach of domination to analyze contemporary firms. The Chapter 3 (The rehabilitation of the idea of domination) is a come back to the theoretical foundations of domination in order to catch on what conditions and by what means domination can be an efficient and sustainable method of government. To do this Courpasson reviews four canonical authors – Durkeim, Weber, Aron and Parsons – in order to conclude to a less tragic view of domination and to a more operational conception of that notion. In Chapter 4 (Domination as a political dynamics), Courpasson implements a theoretical framework that underlines the two empirical studies that are presented in the Chapters 6 and 7. He defines the domination as political dynamics which is supported by the exercise of a power. The constraint sets the means used by the dominants to exercise their power on the action of dominated. They are implied in the mechanism of domination because they keep their autonomy. Lastly, Courpasson shows that the action is characterized by the search for acceptance and not for agreement.

The Chapter 5 (The modernization of banks and individual experiences) is an empirical example of constraint exercised on professionals during the period of intensive modernization of banks (between 1985 and 1995). For Courpasson it was a violent and direct form of domination based on centralized and authoritarian change. In that context, technical legitimacy replaces social legitimacy that produces more impersonal trade. Another change is a contradictory movement of increased delegation and tightened control of the agencies and the professionals. The autonomy of commercials narrows by a reduction in subjectivity in the trade. Centralized control causes a multiplication of tensions in the organization. Chapter 6 (Competency and project: management through soft constraint) discusses politically about two examples of managerial technologies (project management and competencies management). Adopted massively by the firms, they are the new forms of organization based on “the flexible constraint.” The project and the competence act like instruments of domination and control, the first by resting on standardization of the project leader's job, the second by imposing criteria of selection and evaluation of people. Liberal management involves a dynamics of domination, which builds principles of government of the behaviors, with which the executives yield by fear of sanction or exclusion. The previous empirical studies feed a discussion about some of the fundamentals aspects domination generated by the liberal management. According to the Chapter 7 (Risk, community, tools: the liberal organization revised) the managerial form of contemporary liberalism is domination by using the threat. Under the constraint of performance in a competitive environment, the manager must cope with the risks and the threats reduce his choices. Moreover, the decentralization and the constant reorganization in contemporary organizations prevent from building communities. Consequently, the collective logic of solidarity is exceeded by the individual logic of competition for survival.

The final chapter, the eights (The political regimes of the organization), is an attempt to establish a sociological theory of liberal management and to reconsider notions such as legitimacy or despotism. The author points out the paradox of current organizations in their political systems. They are described as “liberal bureaucracy” because, despite decentralization, they rest on the instrumentation for obedience and conformity. Leaders find their legitimacy because the constraints, in liberal context, come from the environment. The author regards eventually the liberal organization as a “despotism softened” based on the centralization of the power and supported by organizational plays orchestrated by leaders.

In his book, Courpasson focuses on the political dimension of the government of firms and on the diversity of the control mechanics that are used in contemporary enterprises. Therefore, contemporary organization remains clearly marked by the acceptance of power, constraints and domination and it is this acceptation that may be make them efficient. This book seem us is an “incontournable” book for those whose are interesting by or working on organizational sociology.