In English, the word 'organisation' can
refer to the act of organising, to the state of being organised, or to an
organised system. Each meaning
emphasises activity: process and practices. Organisations are bounded networks
of people - distinguished as members from non-members - following co-ordinated
procedures: doing things together in inter-related and
institutionalised ways. These procedures are specified explicitly or tacitly,
formal or informally, in bodies of organisational common knowledge:
organisationally-specific symbolic universes, which may be subject to revision
or confirmation and are transmitted to members through processes of
organisational socialisation. Organisations are also networks of identifications
- individually and collectively - which influence strongly who does what within
those procedures, and how. These identifications - positions, offices,
functions, jobs - are specified informally and formally by and in
organisational common knowledge, as are the procedures for allocating or
recruiting individuals to them.
Understood
in this way, everything from families to nation-states (and beyond) can be
described as organisations. That might suggest that the term is too vague and
general to have analytical value. I don't think so, however. First, as
discussed in the previous chapter, not all institutions are organisations.
Second, not all collectivities are organisations. Categories, for example -
collectivities that cannot speak, do not in fact know their own name - are not
organisations. Nor are spontaneous collectivities (crowds, audiences, mobs,
refugees in flight, and so on). Nor are loosely knit networks of individuals
pursuing the same or congruent goals but lacking organised divisions of labour
or authority structures (Boissevain 1968; Mayer 1966; Wellman 1999). The word
'organisation' covers most collectivities, but not all.
In terms of identities,
organisations are constituted simultaneously in a distinction between members
and non-members, on the one hand, and in an internal network of differentiation
among members, on the other. An organisation without internal differentiation
doesn't make much sense: organisation is
the harnessing and orchestration, under a symbolic umbrella, of difference.
Thus between the members of any organisation there is a relationship of
similarity and a range of relationships of difference.
If
organisations were only concerned with their own internal affairs they would be
of limited sociological interest. However, organisational members rarely live
their lives all day and every day wholly within the organisation: the 'total
institution' (Goffman 1968) is the exception rather than the rule. Nor are most
people members of only one organisation. Furthermore, an organisation's raison d'être is the co-ordination
of the activities of a plurality of individuals - not all of whom will
necessarily be members - in collective pursuit of some specified purpose. This
defining purpose is the organisational charter; it is what calls it into
existence, another, and hugely important, part of the common knowledge of the
organisationally specific symbolic universe. An organisation's purposes are
rarely, however, purely or even mainly internal: they are typically oriented
towards and located in the wider, external human world. Organisations are open
to and part of their environments. So much so that their boundaries may be
permeable and osmotic; it isn't always easy to see where they are drawn.
Another
defining feature of organisations requires emphasis: without relations of
authority (or, indeed, power), the successful co-ordination of activities would
be impossible. Some subordination to others is the reciprocal precondition of
individual autonomy, in the same way that similarity is the precondition of
difference and rules create deviance. Organisations - small or large - are
institutionalised networks of hierarchical relationships, of sub- and
superordination, of power and authority. Organisational collectivity is, in
fact, the source of the legitimacy without which authority carries no weight.
For
the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate on two aspects of
organisations1:
·
first,
the ways in which individuals become identified as organisational members (and
as particular organisational members), and
·
second,
the ways in which organisations influence the identification of non-members.
Surveying the historical, local, and
institutional variety of either, let alone both, would be a task more
appropriate to an encyclopaedia. Instead, in order to illustrate the range of
possibilities, I shall discuss a limited selection of procedural types or cases
with respect to each, as examples of general organisational processes. I will
also discuss the consequential nature of organisational identification with
respect to the lives of individuals and the production and reproduction of
patterns of differentiation: hierarchy, stratification, inclusion and
exclusion, etc. In this chapter I focus on organisations and their members; in
the next, on their impact on non-members.
Without personnel renewal and
replacement, the life span of any organisation could be no longer than that of
its most long-lived individual member. Since a characteristic of organisations
is that they can persist despite routine attrition of personnel, procedures for
recruiting replacement members are vital. There are two basic trajectories of
organisational membership.
In the first, the qualifying
criteria of recruitment are 'givens' such as parentage, age and position in the
life-course, gender, etc. Identifications of this kind are intersubjectively
constructed - typically in terms of embodiment and folk notions of biology - as
basic, natural, or primordial. They are also typically collective: they
identify the individual as a member of a group or category. They are understood
as aspects of the individual for which she has little or no responsibility, and
over which she has little or no control. Although in any specific situation the
possibilities may exist of a renunciation of membership by a candidate, a
refusal to recognise a candidate, or her subsequent expulsion, organisational
membership of this kind is generally taken-for-granted, even if not inevitable.
If my sister wants to join the Women's Institute, for example, her age and
gender render her unproblematically eligible.
In
the second trajectory, criteria of membership may be many and varied, but
membership is not entailed in pre-existent characteristics. It is also much
more a matter concerning the individual as
an individual. Membership is, therefore, always to some degree uncertain and
must typically be sought and endorsed: it is a matter of negotiation at the
organisational boundary, and more or less competitive. However, in neither case
is the presence or absence of self-determination and choice a defining feature.
Both trajectories can involve involuntary or imposed organisational membership.
These
two routes into organisational membership may be characterised thus: in the
first an individual is a member or a prospective member by virtue of who she is, in the second by virtue of what she is. Often seen, erroneously, as
a contrast between 'traditional' and 'modern' modes of identity, this has much
in common with the distinction between ascribed
and achieved statuses drawn by Linton
(1936) in his original formulation of status and role2. Ascribed
identification is constructed on the basis of the contingencies of birth.
Achieved - or, to adopt Merton's subsequent, more accurate terminology, acquired (1957: 382) - identifications
are assumed during the subsequent life course, and are generally, although not
necessarily, the outcome of a degree of self-direction. This general
distinction between the ascribed and the acquired isn't specific to
organisational identifications; it can in principle, be applied to all
identities.
The
key distinction informing my model of identification, between the internal and external moments of the dialectic of identification, is heuristic,
presented as an opposition for explanatory purposes. Much the same is true of
ascription and achievement/acquisition. In everyday life the difference between
them is likely to be at most a matter of emphasis. Organisational membership,
no less than any other identity, is thus a particular combination of the
acquired and the ascribed. The ins-and-outs of biography conspire to ensure
that who I am and what I am are not easily disentangled.
This can be taken a little
further. Primary identities such as gender, rooted in very early experience,
are massively implicated in the embodied point of view of selfhood. Following
Linton and Merton, they are ascribed identities and potentially criteria of
organisational membership. But they are also - qua selfhood - important influences on the self-direction that is
so influential in the achievement of identities. However, the purposeful
acquisition of achieved organisational identification depends upon more than
unilateral self-determination. Most significantly, it involves negotiation and
transaction with others - organisational gatekeepers of one kind or another -
who are in a position to recruit individuals to the organisation or to exclude
them, and to decide to which organisational positions individuals will be
recruited. In making their choices, gatekeepers will frequently have recourse
to (ascriptive) criteria such as gender or age.
Where acquired
organisational identities are imposed
on non-members - such as selection
for conscription or imprisonment - ascriptive criteria are likely to be
particularly influential. Imposition can have many consequences, including:
·
no
apparent reaction;
·
internalisation;
·
reluctant
acceptance as legitimate;
·
resentful
endurance; and
·
overt
resistance.
However, as long as categorisation is
recognised - seen, heard, understood - by those upon whom it is visited, or
produces real consequences in their lives, it is never a question of imposition
only. Whatever it might be, there is
always a response: there is always the dialectic between internal and external
identification.
Indeed,
all the above scenarios can be
understood with reference to an internal-external dialectic of identification,
albeit with different emphases in each case. In each there is a relationship of
mutual signification between the ascribed and the achieved or acquired. Even
so, a loose analytical distinction between ascribed and acquired identities
continues to make sense, particularly, perhaps, with respect to organisational
identification. They differ - as Nadel, for example, seems to have appreciated
(1957: 36-41) - in the manner in which individuals enter into them, or take
them on.
With respect to
organisations, this difference is largely, although not only, procedural.
Recruitment to organisational identities where the emphasis falls upon
ascription is a matter of affirmation.
Although membership is immanent, it must be publicly confirmed, registered,
solemnised, consecrated, or whatever. Recruitment to organisational identities
that are achieved or acquired is, however, a matter of rationalisation (cf. Collinson et
al., 1990: 110ff.). Membership must be justified; reasons have to be
offered. Affirmation and rationalisation reflect different sources or kinds of
legitimate authority. In Weber's terms (1978: 212-41), affirmation is rooted in
traditional understandings of
legitimacy, and rationalisation - unsurprisingly - in rational-legal legitimacy.
Affirmation takes many forms. The
Christian ritual of confirmation or First Communion, in which the young person
is received into full membership of the Church, is one example. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah rituals also come to mind (Mars 1990). And there are
options other than the strictly religious: many societies around the world
could be drawn upon to provide examples of life-course rituals in which young
people are initiated into organised age-sets of one kind or another (Bernardi
1985; La Fontaine 1985). Coming of age ceremonies often touch upon more than
the membership of specific organisations: 'These rites of initiation transform
individuals by investing them with socialness' (Cohen 1994: 57). It may be
nothing less than full membership of the collectivity in question that is at
issue (see Richards [1956] for one of the classic anthropological accounts).
Although the ritual dimensions of coming of age have atrophied in the
industrialised societies of modernity, they can still be found, for example, in
the notion of the 'key to the door', or in the informal humiliations that often
attend the 'last night of freedom' of brides- and grooms-to-be.
More
obviously organisational memberships can also depend primarily on the
ascription of 'who you are'. In Northern Ireland, for example, membership of
the Orange Lodge depends upon as many as three ascriptive criteria: being
protestant, being male, and, apropos which
Lodge one joins, family (Bryan 2000: 105-11; Harris 1972: 163, 192-4). And if
we recognise that the family is an informal organisation - or even, in the
bureaucratised modern state, a formal organisation - then the rite of baptism,
for example, is inter alia a public
affirmation of the full organisational membership of a new infant.
Common
to all of the above is a transition from immanent membership to actual
membership - literally, confirmation - and an element of ritualised initiation.
These are important aspects of 'rites of passage', a general category of ritual
first identified by van Gennep (1965) nearly a century ago. Building on his
ideas, there is now a relatively settled consensus that humans experience life
as a series of transitions from one identity to another, that these transitions
are ritualised to a greater or lesser extent, and that the transitions have an approximately tripartite form (Leach
1976: 77-9; Morris 1987: 246-63). That form is not a structural universal, it simply
makes sense logically and situationally: first separation from the present state or identity; then transition or liminality (a state of limbo which may draw upon a symbolic
repertoire relating to death); then finally incorporation
into, or aggregation with, the new
state or identity (which may use birth as a metaphor). In ritual, these phases
may be represented spatially; they always have a temporal sequence, one after
the other. A processual structure of this broad kind appears in all explicit
and organisationally marked identity transitions.
Rites
of passage and the internal-external dialectic of identification have a bearing
on each other. The enhancement of experience which ritual offers, cognitively
and particularly emotionally, plays an important role in the internalisation of
identification. To say this is, in most significant respects, to agree with
Durkheim about the power of ritualised communion. Ritual can invest the symbols
of organisational membership - flags, uniforms, logos, songs - with an
affective weight that transcends occasion or ceremony. It is likely to be of
particular moment in generating individual internal identification with the
external collectivity: making the recruit feel
that she belongs and is part of the greater organisational whole. It may also
distance her from previous identities. Even the formal pattern of separation,
transition and incorporation is amenable to interpretation in this light:
separation weakens existing internal self-identification(s); during transition
the new identity is introduced 'from outside' and dramatised; incorporation
affirms and strengthens the new identification.
Victor
Turner (1974: 119ff), inspired by the theologian Martin Buber, understood that
although the 'we' of collective identification is enormously powerful, it is
always fragile and contingent, always vulnerable to subversion. In my terms, it
is imagined but not imaginary. Among other things, this reflects a
contradiction between the egalitarian inclusivity of 'us' and the internal hierarchical
differentiation of an organisational division of labour. Similarity and
difference play against rather than with each other in organisations. Hence the
organisational importance of rituals of identification. While these are
generally significant as occasions for acting out and practically participating
in the symbolisation of identity, they are particularly momentous in combining
an affirmation and re-affirmation of what Turner calls communitas - undifferentiated 'we-ness', if you like - with a
recognition and legitimation of internal organisational structure.
Ritualised
affirmation of ascriptive identity isn't only a matter of individual membership
or affective affirmation however, nor is it confined to initiation or
recruitment. Ritual also plays an important part in the creation and
communication of organisational common knowledge, in the interests of
co-ordination:
'A public ritual is not just about the transmission of meaning from a central source to each member of an audience; it is also about letting audience members know what other audience members know.' (Chwe 2001: 4)
In addition to rites of passage, there
are many other ritual occasions that organise, orchestrate and reaffirm collective
identifications. Public pageantry offers
many obvious examples of rituals of communal affirmation. From the theatrical
set-pieces of modern state ceremonial (Handelman 1998: 191-233; Lane 1981), to
the more modest ceremonial of 'traditional' states (Cannadine and Price 1987;
Gluckman 1963: 110-36), to the parades of the 'marching season' in Northern
Ireland (Bell 1990; Bryan 2000; Jarman 1997), the theme is similar: the public
reaffirmation and consecration of ascriptive collective identification. Similar
themes can be discerned in more secular rituals (Moore and Meyerhoff 1977) such
as carnivals (Cohen 1980; ) or beauty contests (Wilk 1993). Organised
collective identities which claim to be more than merely 'socially constructed'
are also likely - for both internal and external consumption - to use ritualised
public ceremonial to affirm and symbolise their a-historical essence. Examples
of this include the characteristic and inevitable carnivals of national
identity, and festivals such as the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney,
Australia.
As
well as being an analytical category, class is an ascriptive identity of sorts.
Class is equated in common sense with 'background', referring to family of
origin, and often with 'breeding' too. A sophisticated version of this is the
argument - with which the Eugenics movement, for example, identified itself -
that class differences reflect differential genetic endowments; a view that
probably persists more widely than we know. A mirror image of this, glorifying
the essential nobility of working people, can be seen in Soviet socialist
realist public art. Ceremonial or ritualised (re)affirmations of class
identities are easy to exemplify: on the one hand, the, sadly, declining
spectacles of May Day marches of international workers' solidarity and British
Miners Galas; on the other, Oxbridge May Balls and the numerous set-pieces of
upper-class 'Society'. It is no accident that the middle class(es) - often in
upwardly mobile flight from their 'background', and generally thanks to
achievement - appear less keen to affirm publicly the supposed essence of their
identity.
So,
with respect to ascriptive identifications such as family, age, ethnicity,
gender, and even class, ritual (re)affirmation is of considerable significance.
It may actually be fundamental: identity - as a definitively interactional
construct - can never be essential or primordial, so it has to be made to seem so. We have to be made to feel 'we'. And collectivities, as
discussed in earlier chapters, are not embodied in quite the way that
individuals are. In addition, the potential tension between ascriptive
inclusion (similarity) and hierarchy (difference) should be born in mind. These
difficulties are all addressed when the power of symbol and ritual is brought
to bear. Organised collective identity is endowed, via collective ritual and
'communitas', with personal authenticity and experiential profundity. It is
also given shape in common knowledge. Inasmuch as public ritual is
performative, it is a powerful and visible embodiment of the abstraction of collective
identity (cf. Connerton 1989: 41-71). Rituals gather together enough members
for embodied collectivity to be 'socially real'. The individual - whether
participating as an individual or as 'one of the crowd' - is included in the
organised collectivity in the most potent fashion. Individual diversity finds a
place within symbolised unity. The imagined ceases to be imaginary.
Ascription is, however, as much a principle of
exclusion as inclusion; it encourages expulsion as well as recruitment. The
refusal to admit women, Jews, and black people - and these are only the most
obvious cases - to membership of exclusive clubs is one such situation. More
consequential are the less thoroughgoing but nonetheless significant
discriminations that operate in the labour and education markets of a country
such as Britain. At its most comprehensive, ascriptive exclusion can plumb the
depths reached by regimes of slavery, by the Republic of South Africa during apartheid, or by the racialised state
created in Nazi Germany.
The argument is now approaching
situations in which important elements of rationalisation figure. The point
that ascription and achievement/acquisition are not easy to disentangle in
everyday life can be made in many ways. Ascriptive exclusion may, for example,
define the arena within which the principle of competition comes into play in
recruitment. A club may not admit women, Jews or black people, but that doesn't
mean that any white male can join.
The choice of which white males is a matter for rationalisation, even if only
at the level of procedural correctness. Ascriptive inclusion - the
organisational boundary - may delineate the space within which internal
position and office are competitively achieved. And there are subtler possibilities.
An employer who would rather not hire black employees is not committed to
hiring whites regardless of their capacity to do the job in question. But nor,
in the absence of a white person fitting the bill, is she totally constrained
from hiring a black worker. Rationalisation permits both options.
These
examples illustrate the interaction of selection criteria of 'acceptability'
and 'suitability' (Jenkins 1983: 100-28; 1986: 46-79). In competitive
organisational recruitment, ascriptive criteria - 'who you are' - are most
likely to influence the identification of acceptability, which can be broadly
defined as whether or not an individual will 'fit in' to the networks and
relationships of the organisation, or be the right 'kind of person' in general.
Suitability, however, emphasises achieved or acquired characteristics relating
to 'what you are'. This is typically a matter of competence. It can also be,
however, in voluntary organisations for example, a question of interests or
attitudes. Suitability is more an issue when a particular organisational
position, rather than just membership (or a broad category of membership), is
at stake. Notions of suitability are definitively involved in employment
recruitment, for example, but are less likely to influence recruitment to club
membership. Where both criteria are influential, permutations are possible:
individuals may be suitable but unacceptable, or vice versa.
The
distinction between suitability and acceptability is rarely clear-cut. Being
identified as the most suitable person for an organisational position guarantee
doesn't your recruitment to it. 'Whether your face fits' may contribute to
colleaguely relations and, hence, to fulfilling the organisational charter. So
is it a kind of competence? Suitability can't always be easily specified; there
may be a number of equally suitable candidates; the threshold of suitability
may be low. In situations such as these, questions of acceptability - now
concerning the individual and the idiosyncratic, rather than the categorical -
may once again become influential. And both suitability and acceptability offer
a basis for competitive recruitment. There is no straightforward equivalence
between the ascribed and the acceptable, or the acquired and the suitable. It is
possible to argue that gender, for example, is sometimes a legitimate criterion
of suitability. And acceptability can depend on factors such as marital or
domestic situation, or attitudes to abortion or nuclear disarmament (or
whatever), which are unlikely to be a matter of ascription. And so on.
There
may be no straightforward equivalences, but there is a modern discourse that
emphasises opportunity, achievement and access, particularly with respect to
economic activity and benefits. Or there are, rather, two related modern
discourses: of meritocracy and of equality. The two do not always make happy
partners - the idea of meritocracy, for example, owes a frequently
unacknowledged debt to notions of 'liberty' which isn't readily compatible with
equality - but they come together in the western democracies in the political
project of equality of opportunity (Paul et
al. 1987). This is relevant here because of its emphasis upon access for
all to fair competitive organisational recruitment. From the point of view of
the promotion of equality of opportunity, ascriptive criteria or criteria of
acceptability require special justification.
And
here we can begin to appreciate the sociological importance of the organisation
of identification, for the production and reproduction of large-scale patterns
of differentiation and stratification. Ascriptive identities are not only
collective; they are intersubjectively widely recognised. Significant numbers
of people agree on the nominal boundaries of male and female, black and white,
etc. The understandings of 'us' and 'them' across those boundaries - the
virtual identifications - are less consensual; it depends on point of view. But
the basic outlines, the scaffolding around which virtual identification -
played out in the history of consequences - is constructed, will typically be
relatively clear.
In this sense, ascription may be widely
understood as the 'inevitable' result of 'natural differences': it isn't,
however, innocent of self-interest or competition for collective advantage. It
informs widespread processes of categorisation: the defining of others in the
external moment of the dialectic of identification. Among those processes is
recruitment into organisations. Organisational membership in any context is
therefore likely to reflect local ascriptive categories of identification. We
know that this is often the case. At least two, analytically distinct,
organisational processes produce this situation.
In
the first, people organise themselves in terms of ascription: this organisation
is for 'us', with 'us' understood in a particular way. The organisational
charter defines membership: Poppleton Working
Men's Club, the Eastend Punjabi Youth Association, Old Sarum University Women's Society, Boyne Square Protestant Defenders Flute Band, and so
on. Organisation along these ascriptive lines is a potent political and
economic resource. Among its advantages are an ideology of natural or
primordial community and loyalty, the symbolisation and valorisation of
identity, comradeship and mutual support, pooled resources, the organisation of
collective action, and the creation of opportunities - jobs or whatever - for
members.
In
the second, the organisational charter does not define membership in ascriptive
terms. It may in fact evince a commitment to competitive, achievement-based
membership. However, those who are in a position to recruit or reject
prospective members may draw upon ascriptive criteria in their decision-making.
For example, a manager may refuse to employ men as production workers in a
factory assembling electrical components, because he 'knows' that women are
more dextrous and don't want to work full-time, and that men can't tolerate the
boredom. As a result of this managerial categorisation, the factory employs only
women in the majority of jobs. If there is consistency in the common knowledge
of managers in general - some participation in a shared symbolic universe -
then their recruitment decisions will draw upon similar typifications and
stereotypes, and will contribute to the production of a wider pattern in which
women are disproportionately represented in part-time, semi-skilled assembly
work.
Reflecting
consistencies in their recruitment,
careers, and the constraints within which they work, managers are likely to have identification,
experience and knowledge in common: class background, 'race', gender, politics,
orientation towards business, organisational and professional socialisation,
etc. That they should behave similarly in similar circumstances is not remarkable.
The process may be even more avowedly exclusionary than the example given:
racism and sexism, for example remain potent forces in recruitment (Collinson et al 1990; Jenkins 1986). Organisations
- and although I have focussed on employing organisations, discrimination
operates in many other areas - may be nominally open to all but virtually
closed to many categories of the population, excluded on the basis of
ascription.
People
join - or attempt to join - organisations for many reasons: to validate an
existing self-identification, to change it, or for other reasons more
idiosyncratic. This applies in employment and across the spectrum of politics,
education and leisure activities. Distinctions between identity and other
aspects of the person (whatever that
means) are difficult to maintain. Does someone become a hunt saboteur because
she is opposed to cruelty to foxes, because she likes the image of herself as a
'sab', because 'that'll really make my mother mad', because she can't stand
'upper-class pratts on horses', or because she fancies 'that bloke with the
dreads'? It is not easy to know. But it all contributes to identification.
People
also form organisations as vehicles
for their identity projects. This has already been suggested in the case of
ascription; it is no less true for acquired identities. The organisational
charter may refer to facilitating and improving the wider public understanding
of train-spotting, or sado-masochism, or whatever, but that cannot be divorced
from the train-spotters or sado-masochists who are the members, and their
cause(s). And many of the advantages that accrue in the case of organisations
based on ascription - support, symbolisation, pooled resources, co-ordinated
action - apply equally to organisations oriented around acquired identities.
Whether
emphasising ascription or acquisition, membership in different organisations
has different consequences for individual identification. Scarcity is an
obvious factor. Joining the Mickey Mouse Club, where the only qualification for
membership is a small fee sent through the mail, is clearly less significant
than finally, the day after your ninth birthday, having made yourself a pain in
the neck for the last few months, being initiated as only the fifth member of
your big brother's gang. And exclusivity isn't just a matter of competitive
scarcity: the membership criteria matter, too (hence the power of ascription).
In ascriptive theory, at least, you can only be in or out. The boundary between
'in' and 'out', dramatised as it often is by ritual, may also be the threshold
between the sacred and the profane. On one side purity, on the other danger
(Douglas 1966). Certainly other factors contribute to the strength of
particular organisational identifications - the effectiveness of initiation
(and, indeed, its affectiveness), external pressures on the group, the
penalties attached to leaving, and so on - but the importance of exclusivity
shouldn't be underestimated.
Whatever
the context, in competitive recruitment a degree of rationalisation is called
for. This can be a matter of reasons, or a matter of procedure, or both. The
question of reasons has already been discussed: is someone acceptable? are they
suitable? These are reasons. Procedures may not be easily separable from
reasons, however. Sometimes procedural correctness provides sufficient
legitimation for the outcome. That the proper procedure has been followed is
reason enough.
A
good example here is the ordeal, a
category of ritual which figures in a variety of organisational initiations:
from the theatrical pretension of the Masonic rite, to the violence of a
motorcycle gang, to the psycho-sexual emotional trials of some New Guinean
peoples, to the torment often visited on new recruits to the military. In the
ordeal, survival rationalises recruitment. As ritual, it dramatises and
authenticates the achievement of membership, both for the recruit and for her
new colleagues. In this sense it contributes to both internal and external
identification. The other major context in which the ordeal figures
historically - determination of guilt or innocence in the face of accusation3
- also has serious implications for membership. An unfavourable outcome
to a judgmental ordeal may result in expulsion from membership; recruitment may
depend - and here we are back to initiation - upon satisfactory reputation or
character.
More
characteristic of modern organisational recruitment, however, is the interview and its associated screening
procedures (which may also be experienced as an ordeal). Interviewing is rooted
in the informally institutionalised or ritualised human world of Goffman's
interaction order: one or more people talk to another person - this is a
definitively oral interactional form - in order to find out sufficient about
her to decide about her recruitment (or, indeed, whatever fate is in question).
However, the organised interview has arguably become the generic form of bureaucratic interactional encounter. Its only
rival is the committee (and the two are, of course, combined in the board or
panel).
The
bureaucratic interview has a number of characteristic features (see Jenkins
1986: 128-9, for more extended discussion):
·
There
are always two sides, interviewer(s) and interviewee(s).
·
There
is a situational hierarchy. One side - the interviewer - is typically in charge
of the procedure and of the determination of outcomes. This hierarchy derives
from the interviewer's organisational position
(particularly her control over resources), and, although not always,
from her possession of the legitimate competences to carry off interviewing
authoritatively.
· The business of the interview is the allocation of resources or penalties to the interviewee. The legitimacy of that allocation is grounded in adherence to more or less formally constituted procedures and in the reasons which inform the decision-making.
·
However,
the interview is not necessarily about decision-making on the spot. It may, for
example, be about the ex post facto
justification or rationalisation of decision-making that has already taken
place (Silverman and Jones 1976); alternatively, it may send recommendations on
elsewhere.
·
Finally,
interviews are generally private. The protection of privacy is extended as much
- indeed more - to interviewer(s) as to interviewee: decisions can be made
without the scrutiny of an audience.
The ordeal, by contrast, is typically a
public or semi-public event, which requires
an audience for its legitimacy.
The
ordeal and the interview are not the only forms of rationalisation: recruitment
by election, by nomination, or by lottery
can be important too, drawing on legitimatory rhetorics of democracy, authority
and chance. And rationalisation does not preclude affirmation. Once an
individual's recruitment to an organisation has been rationalised, nothing
prevents that decision being subsequently ceremonially affirmed. There is every
reason for doing so, if the arguments about the affective power of ritual, and
its role in organisational common knowledge, are correct. Rationalised membership
needs authenticity too.
Existing
members can also have their membership re-affirmed and re-authenticated. A good
example is the 'team-building' which figures in staff development programmes in
many employing organisations in industrial societies. One common model is the
'residential': staff are taken away from work and home to spend a few days 'out
of time', engaging together in a range of activities - from outdoor pursuits,
to intensive group work, to equally intense socialising - after which they return
home, ideally somewhat transformed (otherwise what's the point?). Separation,
limbo, and (re)incorporation: the rite of passage analogy is irresistible.
These are some, but only some, of the
ways in which organisations affect the identities of their members.
Organisations are, first and foremost, groups. As we proceed through life, our
organisational memberships make a significant contribution to the diversity of
the expanding portfolios that are our individual identities: who we are. The
internal-external dialectic of identification can be seen at work not only
between members, but also between members and non-members. Organisations are
constituted in the tension between solidary similarity, vis-à-vis outsiders, and the internal hierarchical differentiation
of members from each other. Although the internal moment of group
identification is a consistent and necessary thread of organisational
identification, on balance categorisation - of outsiders by insiders, of
members by other members - is the dominant theme of recruitment and initiation.