Max Weber and the sociology of organization: Reflections on a concept of pre-modern organization 9783658402860, 9783658402877

Table of contents :
Contents
1: Introduction
1.1 Organization as a Theory of Modernity
1.1.1 American Neo-institutionalism
1.1.2 Political Economy of the Organization
1.1.3 Systems Theory
1.1.4 History of Terms
2: Max Weber and the Sociology of Organization
2.1 On the Reception of Max Weber in Organizational Sociology
2.2 Bureaucracy and Rational Organization of Labor as Organizations
2.2.1 “Bureaucratic Rule”
2.2.2 Rational Organisation of Work
3: On the Concept of Pre-modern Organization
3.1 Internal Structure of Organisations
3.2 External Relations of Organisations
3.3 Combative Organisations
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

Philipp Jakobs

Max Weber and the sociology of organization Reflections on a concept of pre-modern organization

Max Weber and the sociology of organization

Philipp Jakobs

Max Weber and the sociology of organization Reflections on a concept of pre-modern organization

Philipp Jakobs Institut für Politische Wissenschaft und Soziologie Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Bonn, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-40286-0    ISBN 978-3-658-40287-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

1 Introduction ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 1.1 Organization as a Theory of Modernity ��������������������������������������������� 3 1.1.1 American Neo-institutionalism ��������������������������������������������� 4 1.1.2 Political Economy of the Organization ��������������������������������� 9 1.1.3 Systems Theory ���������������������������������������������������������������������14 1.1.4 History of Terms���������������������������������������������������������������������20 2 Max  Weber and the Sociology of Organization���������������������������������������27 2.1 On the Reception of Max Weber in Organizational Sociology�����������28 2.2 Bureaucracy and Rational Organization of Labor as Organizations �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������31 2.2.1 “Bureaucratic Rule”���������������������������������������������������������������32 2.2.2 Rational Organisation of Work�����������������������������������������������35 3 On  the Concept of Pre-modern Organization�����������������������������������������39 3.1 Internal Structure of Organisations�����������������������������������������������������44 3.2 External Relations of Organisations���������������������������������������������������57 3.3 Combative Organisations �������������������������������������������������������������������65 Conclusion �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������73 References�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������77

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Introduction

There may be some truth in the numerous diagnoses that describe our modern times in the threatening light of organization. In terms like “corporate capitalism,” “administered world,” or “organizational society,” there is an inkling of the immense significance that consciously created, “rationally” structured special-­ purpose associations have gained for our contemporary social situations in a variety of ways (cf. Weber, 1988a, p.  10; Adorno, 1972, p.  455f.; Schimank, 2001, p. 278f.; cf. also Graeber, 2015, p. 144ff.). In contrast, the scientific sociology of organization usually urges modesty: there is no such thing as an “organizational society” or an “organization of the world”, since organizations do not constitute the social whole, society cannot itself be “organized” (cf. Kühl, 2003b, p.  381f.). However, organizational sociology also relates “organization” to modernity: only here is the “ballast” of tradition thrown off and thus the social conditions are finally given that make an organization of human relations possible. Only modernity knows organizations in a sociologically unambiguous sense, and organizational sociology must therefore limit itself to modernity. Both for the analysis of organizations in general and for their limitation to modernity in particular, reference is repeatedly made – positively or negatively – to Max Weber and his idealtype of rational rule by means of a bureaucratic administrative staff. This is astonishing in two ways. On the one hand Weber, as Renate Mayntz very rightly pointed out early on, cannot be regarded without further ado as a sociologist of organization (cf. Mayntz, 1968, p.  27ff.). On the other hand Weber’s appropriation of the concept of organization for a restriction to modernity is astonishing insofar as, as the historian Gerhard Otto Oexle points out, unlike his sociological contemporaries Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, or Georg Simmel, Weber did not draw any principled dividing line between the Middle Ages © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 P. Jakobs, Max Weber and the sociology of organization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7_1

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1 Introduction

and modernity, but rather, despite all “disenchantment” and “rationalization,” sought to emphasize both historical continuities and precisely the “modernity” of pre-­modernity (cf. Oexle, 1994, p. 132ff.). Nevertheless, Weber’s concept of the “bureaucratic administrative staff” as well as his concept of the “rational organisation of work” can certainly be seen as starting points for a sociology of organization, which seem to support a modernisation-theoretical interpretation of “organisation”. Such an interpretation is countered here by the assumption that “organisation” can be understood more appropriately, also and especially with Weber, as a general human potential that could be realised within the history of mankind, not always, but repeatedly and surely long before the upheavals of the last centuries that led to a “modernity” understood in whatever way. While this may ultimately be an argument about words, that does not mean it is inconsequential. Words have consequences – both in terms of our theoretical understanding of reality and in terms of our possibilities to act practically within it. The isolated view of contemporary forms of organization that threatens to become the norm in organizational sociology and even in our everyday thinking about organizations not only overlooks the great importance that organized social associations – be they state bureaucracies, temple schools, workshops, or warrior leagues – have had for human history for thousands of years, but also obscures a realistic view of the significance of organizations in our world today. If one also includes pre-modern organizations in the consideration by dropping any principal dividing line between today’s situation, in which the achievement of almost every purpose seems to be within the realm of possibility through the work of private or state organizations – and therefore everything must be organized – and an allegedly “irrational” past with religious mythologies, fully integrated kinship systems and class orders, which would no longer offer any room for “innovations” through consciously created, rationally structured associations – i.e.: Organizations –, the view first opens up for the special structural features of modern organizations as well as the not only numerically pervasive importance that organizations have attained today. It seems to me that such a perspective, which seeks to emphasize the individual and at the same time universal aspects of our present-day social situation, especially by looking back, is entirely in the spirit of Max Weber. And if one takes a closer look at his work, a concept of organization that reaches far beyond the modern age is much more plausible than one that is limited to it. The aim of this essay is to elaborate such a non-modernization-biased concept of organization on the basis of Weber. This is less a matter of the purely exegetical problem of uncovering a general concept of “organization” already somehow contained in Weber’s work. This would be futile for the interests pursued here, if only because what was understood by “organization” in Weber’s time was quite d­ ifferent

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from what is understood by it today, and the conceptual synthesis of organizations as closed social systems that is common today, as will be shown in more detail below, was also based to a large extent on the development of organizational research that was just beginning at Webers times and that he therefore could not have possibly known in its maturity. Rather, starting from today’s understanding of “organizations” as social systems we shall look for points of reference in Weber’s work that make an extension of the concept to pre-modern times plausible and at the same time specify the characteristics of organizations in general. This, of course, also requires a critical reflection on today’s understanding of “organization”, as it can be traced in various approaches of organizational sociology and on the basis of the history of the term (Chap. 1). In particular, the various reasons for limiting the concept of organization to modernity seem to provide important clues for our purposes. Subsequently, a brief sketch of Weber’s reception in the sociology of organization and a look at Weber’s own work will be used to determine the extent to which it is at all justified to take Weber as an advocate for a concept of organization that links organizations to modernity (Chap. 2). Finally, taking Weber as a starting point and including some recent theoretical and empirical-historical findings, a new concept of organization will be elaborated and the internal structure as well as the external relations of organizations will be described (Chap. 3). If at the end the reader then finds a theoretically somewhat plausible concept of organization that can be applied across epochal boundaries, only a first small step has been taken. The value of such a general concept results not from its theoretical derivation, but only from its usefulness for a always individualizing application to the empirical-historical case it is supposed to explicate. To this main task of a historical sociology of organization, the present work can only be regarded as a small step.

1.1 Organization as a Theory of Modernity Organizations as self-contained social units or “social systems” – and not organization in the sense of a structural feature of social systems or in the sense of the process of coordinating actions – form the subject of organizational sociology (cf. early on already Mayntz, 1963, p. 7; Kühl, 2020, p. 13f.).1 While there is still no  The distinction between the system concept and the structural concept of organization, as recently developed by Rena Schwarting (cf. Schwarting, 2020, p. 111f.), is instructive in this respect. In addition, there could be a “process concept” of organization, which encompasses the action-related notion of planning and coordination, which is found above all in everyday use, but also to some extent in scientific use of the word. 1

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agreement among the various theoretical schools as to how these social units should be defined in a separable way, it is generally assumed that they are specifically modern entities, which may have one or two precursors in the “Dark Ages” or only in early modern times, but which themselves appeared much later in the course of various modernization processes. Even sociologists who do not deny the existence of organizations in pre-modern societies, such as the “Hochkulturen” of antiquity, nevertheless focus their consideration on the specifically modern form of organization and align their conceptualization with this (cf. Scott, 2003, p.  3; Luhmann, 2019b, p. 18).2 The different sociological schools provide different justifications for this temporal limitation of their subject matter, each of which is related to a different definition of organization.3 Going beyond genuine sociological approaches to organization, however, implications of modernization theory can also be traced in the historical semantics of the concept of “organization” itself. As will be shown in the following, the various justifications for limiting the organizational phenomenon to modern societies are not compelling, assume a clearly under-complex picture of past epochs, or simply refer to something other than what is usually and sensibly understood by “organization” today.

1.1.1 American Neo-institutionalism The most important decidedly sociological school of theory in organisational research in the USA is the socological “neo-institutionalism”. It comprises a whole range of approaches to organization theory, which are held together by a common reference to social phenomenological and constructivist paradigms and by a common opposition to a one-sided economic view of organizations (cf. Senge, 2011, p. 81f.; Scott, 2014, p. 47f.). The concept of “organization” is defined by neo-institutionalists only rarely and not uniformly in terms of content (cf. Kirchner et al., 2015, p. 195). However, they  One of the few exceptions is Hans Geser’s sociology of organization, which not only concedes the existence of organizations of a certain kind to early advanced civilizations, but also places such early organizations on a par with modern organizations in terms of their formal structure and social effects (cf. Geser, 1982, p. 114f.). 3  In accordance with the interest in historical classification, only theoretical approaches that explicitly deal with the connection between organization and (social) history come into question here. Thus, for example, the micropolitical approach, contingency theory or behaviouristic approaches as well as the mainly business-oriented structuration theory approach are left out here. 2

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are usually at least in agreement that it is primarily a category of imagination or a “cultural model”, which as such must already exist within a socio-cultural environment before social actors can create a concrete organization or transform an existing association into an organization: “Cultural models of organizing precede the creation of organizations” (Scott, 2014, p.  195; see also Brunsson & Sahlin-­ Anderson, 2000, p. 722). Thus, in the form of specific working techniques, norms, values or theories that exist as so-called “institutional structures” in a sociocultural environment, there may also exist ideas of a “rational” and therefore legitimate “organization”, so that an “entrepreneur” as a deliberate decision-maker only needs to put together the various “building blocks” to create an organization (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 345; Scott, 2014, p. 183). At the same time, these models have a normative force, so that they must be incorporated by existing social associations in order for them to secure their legitimacy as “organizations” (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 345; Ahrne & Brunsson, 2011, p. 736). According to the neo-institutionalist consensus, such models of “organization”, and consequently organizations in the sense of associations structured according to the models, do not occur in every social environment. Rather, their “institutional structure” must exhibit a certain degree of “rationalization” that has only emerged in the course of specific processes of modernization. Depending on the author, these may include an increasing scientification of the world, a universalization of theoretical and practical knowledge, the assertion of an idea of individuals and collectives as independent actors, but also a decline in the importance of nation-state authorities and the ideal image of a market as a regulator of social relations (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 739f.; Meyer et al., 2006, p. 40). These “institutional” conditions of organization-like associations have, according to the common argument of neo-institutionalists, only formed within the last 200 years, although the more precise dating varies. In terms of content, “organizations” and the ideas associated with them are usually assumed to be facts of experience in everyday life that do not require strict scientific definition, but some exemplification at most. However, where the “modernity” of “organizations” is to be justified, i.e. where a specific (historical) definition of boundaries is required, it is usually possible to trace the authors’ scientific understanding of the term. Nils Brunsson and Kerstin Sahlin-Anderson, for example, define the essential aspects of organisations as identity, hierarchy and rationality. Identity implies that individual organisations have a certain degree of autonomy and a clear definition of boundaries, which distinguishes them from other organisations. Hierarchy involves the coordination of actions through a vertical structure in which more or less independent “managers” make independent decisions and exercise control. Finally, by rationality, the authors mean, on the one hand, the intentionality or

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goal-directedness of organizations, and on the other hand, the systematic methods used by decision-makers to achieve goals. If all aspects are formed, an organization can be understood as an independent social actor that can make and implement decisions (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 723ff.). This characterization is related to a cross-country analysis of public sector reforms, which in Brunsson’s and Sahlin-Anderson’s interpretation aim at a “completion” of the organizational model. In order to be considered a ‘complete’ or ‘real’ organisation in this sense, they argue, the federation must be consistent with all the aforementioned aspects of the organisational model and, to that extent, must be able to be perceived as an actor in its own right. According to the two authors, this was originally typically the case with private business enterprises (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 731). Primarily not “real” organizations, on the other hand, are other associations that cannot be understood as actors themselves but, if they are subject to external directives, as instrumental “agents” or, if their members are oriented towards external norms or standards, as professional “arenas” (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, pp. 732–734). State authorities as well as associations in which “professionals” are gathered, such as universities or hospitals, therefore are excluded from the definition. The model of the “real” organization is understood as an “institution” to which “agents” and “arenas” are also increasingly oriented and in the direction of which the public sector reforms studied were aimed (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 736). Patricia Bromley and John W. Meyer define the organizational model somewhat differently: according to them, “organizations”, in contrast to older entities, are based on scientific rationality and the idea of empowered people with rights (cf. Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p. 940). Organisational structures are therefore also designed for participation and recognition of rights; clear, one-sided chains of command or a clear differentiation between decision-makers and implementers, on the other hand, are atypical (cf. Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p. 950f.; cf. also Meyer et al., 2006, p. 44f.). Bromley and Meyer root the emergence of “organizations” thus understood in various cultural processes that have come to bear since the end of the Second World War and the rise of so-called “neoliberalism”. These processes have involved, on the one hand, scientific knowledge acquiring a decisive, legitimizing significance and, on the other, the dissolution of previous social authorities  – especially the nation-state – in favor of an empowered actor model (cf. Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p.  948). “Organizations,” according to the authors, have absorbed these cultural processes and therefore also emerge as actors in their own right, distinct from older, “passive” or merely “instrumental” associations:

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Early bureaucracies, which included governments, the church, armies, and early corporations, had a rationalized, quasi-scientific form. But they were centralized structures intended to effectively and efficiently carry out the goals of a sovereign or owner; lower levels of the hierarchy had little autonomy or empowerment. (Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p. 949; see also Meyer et al., 2006, p. 39f.)

Due to the specific legitimacy of the universalist principles of science and individual empowerment, these originally very different older associations became increasingly similar to each other, thereby first establishing “organization” as a field of study in its own right (cf. Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p. 952). While the emergence of “organizations” is otherwise usually placed by neo-­ institutionalists (and other sociologists of organization) already in the period of industrialization or even the early modern era, Bromley and Meyer, by setting the Second World War as the demarcation line, clearly shorten the history of “organization”. Accordingly, the emergence of organizations in their sense is also not tied to a modernization process, but to a transformation of “late modernity” into a universalized, globalized, and rationalized “post-modernity” that they claim is determined in particular by the demise of the nation-state and the assertion of a “world society” (cf. Bromley & Meyer, 2017, p. 956; cf. also Meyer et al., 2006, p. 32ff.). Regarding neo-institutionalism, the reasons for the historical limitation of organization to modernity or post-modernity lie primarily in a conceptual decision that assigns the object of study “organization” as a cultural model to the everyday ideas of social actors, which are well known to be subject to historical changes. The description of the respective model as well as its historical location thus superficially follow purely empirical aspects. It is all the more remarkable that the various models, which have been further elaborated in terms of content, exclude from the concept certain types of entities that would unquestionably be regarded as organizations in everyday understanding. State authorities and administrations as well as hospitals or universities can only be considered “incomplete” organizations according to Brunsson and Sahlin-Anderson’s definition. Any association with a clear hierarchy and separation of decision-makers and operational core, which still applies to countless factories, authorities or armies worldwide – normally examples of organisations par excellence – are excluded from the term according to Bromley and Meyer’s determination of it. The problem thus touched upon is also reflected in an ambiguity of the term “organization” within the argumentation of various neo-institutionalist approaches: while on the one hand the term refers to the rationalized models that are present in a modern historical-cultural environment and that define newly forming “organizations” as such accordingly, on the other hand it usually also designates those

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a­ lready existing “organizations” that first have to incorporate the new models in order to secure their legitimacy (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 745; Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p.  731). This gives rise, for instance, to the apparently paradoxical argument that the specific notion of organizations that implies an independent actor is what makes organizations organizations in the first place (cf. Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 739). The reason for this ambivalence of the term lies in a conflation of scientific category of understanding and everyday practical notion, of concept and object of scientific consideration.4 However, a conceptual distinction between “organizations” as a sociological category and the various cultural, historically highly changeable models that have specific conceptions of organizations as their content makes perfect sense. In this view, the public service reforms that Brunsson and Sahlin-Anderson describe are not oriented towards organizations in general, but towards very specific organizational models that are modeled after private business enterprises and to which very specific notions of rationality and efficiency are attached. And it is also not organizations in general that Bromley and Meyer have in mind when they analyze the isomorphies of modern, international organizations, but very specific normative conceptions of an ideal, cosmopolitan organization that has freedom from domination and independence from traditional ties written all over it. It is precisely when organization and specific cultural model are separated that the fruitfulness of the neo-­ institutionalist approaches can be glimpsed: it opens up the historical genesis and practical consequences of organizational or management models as a field of sociological investigation. To regard “organization” itself as such a model, on the other hand, underestimates its historical richness of variants and exposes the sociology of organization to the danger of losing its object of study with the emergence of new cultural models, without being left with a benchmark with which to examine these very models. Even if the claimed dependence on “rationalized” ideas in an institutional environment, as far as the conceptual content of “organization” is concerned, is also quite justified for a scientific category of understanding “organization”, the concept of rationalization, which the neo-institutionalists adopt primarily from the work of Max Weber, does not in itself allow for a fixation on modernity, since for Weber “there have been rationalizations in the various spheres of life in highly different ways in all cultural circles. Characteristic of the difference in cultural history is first: which spheres and in which direction they were rationalized” (Weber, 1988a,  This is by no means to suggest that scientific concepts cannot also be made the object of scientific consideration; but in one and the same consideration a lack of differentiation between concept and object leads to sometimes serious ambiguities and erroneous conclusions. 4

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p. 11f.).5 Organizations are therefore indeed “rational” and dependent on “rationalizations”. But to limit “rationalization” to its specifically “modern occidental” form would be to shorten the scope of the term and to underestimate the mental and social capacities of “pre-modern” people. Here too, therefore, lies no compelling reason to regard organizations as specifically modern entities.

1.1.2 Political Economy of the Organization In Germany, organizational sociology has only gradually been able to establish itself as an independent sociological subdiscipline since the 1980s (cf. Hiller & Pohlmann, 2015, p. 47). Due to different disciplinary traditions and institutional conditions, e.g. its anchoring at universities and not at “business schools” as in the USA, it is clearly separated from the US-American “mainstream” both in terms of content and in terms of strongly asymmetrical lines of reception (cf. Hiller & Pohlmann, 2015, pp. 49ff., 63f.). While a more practice-oriented, economic perspective on the individual organisation and its internal structures was dominant in the USA for a long time  – neo-institutionalism can be regarded as a counter-­ movement that also absorbs numerous European influences  – German organisational sociology was guided early on by an interest in social theory that attempts to grasp the individual organisation in the context of comprehensive, societal structures and processes (cf. Hiller & Pohlmann, 2015, p. 50).6 An important example of this interest is the political-economic perspective on organizations, which was developed in particular by Klaus Türk and Michael Bruch following historical-materialist approaches and sociological traditions of domination theory. In many respects it is comparable to neo-institutionalism, although the importance of purely “cultural” factors is greatly diminished in favour of domination and economics. Like neo-institutionalism, it also relates the concept of “organization” to a “cultural model” – or in the language of historical materialism: to the relations of production or the superstructure of society (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 122f.; Bruch, 2000, p. 52). “Organization” in this sense is understood as a “general social dispositif of orientation, motivation, and evaluation of practices” (Bruch & Türk, 2005, p. 283). Organizations, again comparable to neo-institutionalism, are intentional realizations of these “institutional” or “dispositive” aspects of “organization” in the sense of a “combinative application” of them (Bruch & Türk,  Cf. on the “anthropological” scope of Weber’s concept of rationalization, esp. Tenbruck (1980, p. 337ff.). 6  Cf. also the anthology by Ortmann et al. (1997). 5

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2005, p. 284; cf. also Türk, 1995, p. 116). They structure, in the terminology of the authors, the societal “relations of Ko-Operation ”,7 which, in the context of Marxian theory, represent the material level of “living labour” or the “productive forces”. Going beyond neo-institutionalism, however, Türk and Bruch also assign an essential function to “organization” within the material reproduction of society and its relations of domination.8 In doing so, they argue, again not unlike the neo-­ institutionalists, against a one-sided economistic explanation of “organization” in terms of production efficiency. Unlike the neo-institutionalists, however, they do not counter such explanations with mere considerations of the legitimacy of ready-­ made, closed organizations, but rather with the interests of domination and accumulation of identifiable, elite groups that make use of “organization” instrumentally in the pursuit of certain goals (cf. Bruch, 2000, p.  51). In this context, the symbolic closure of the organization as a social unit is also understood as a domination-­securing fiction that opposes the organization’s factual openness to its socio-ecological context (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 88). Therefore, instead of speaking of organizations, the authors, when referring to the real contexts of action, usually speak of “organizational contexts” or “organizational action”. The specific notions of rationality and corporate accountability contained in the “organisational” dispositif, and the resulting possibilities of internalising and externalising returns and costs, serve to create such symbolically closed contexts, which are intended to both enable and legitimise the absorption of external “surplus value”. In contrast to associations or corporations, for example, which primarily structure the internal relationships of their members, organised action, according to the authors, is always directed towards influencing third parties (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 118; 1997, p. 170; Türk et al., 2006, p. 36). Thus, for example, the “employee” within a stock company is not understood as a member, but as a “resource” whose labour power is exploited as that of a “third party” by the shareholders by means of the organisational institution of the “stock company”. In the same way, schools and universities, political parties or state administrations are not primarily directed towards any internally manageable tasks common to the “members”, but outwardly towards influencing third parties, be they pupils or students, potential voters or citizens (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 119f.). In the sense of the authors, organisations are thus  In Türk’s terminology, the somewhat artificial concept of “Ko-Operation” (co-operation) serves to distinguish it, on the one hand, from concepts with economistic connotations such as “work” and, on the other hand, from concepts that imply unanimity such as “cooperation” (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 287). 8  For a profound and very illuminating examination of neo-institutionalism by this historicalmaterialist school of theory, see Türk (1997). 7

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characterised by a differentiating inclusion or a differentiating determination of the relationship of the participants to the organisation, which reserves real “membership” for the upper circle. The other participants, on the other hand, are subject to “extroversive” rule, according to them. In terms of content, “organisation” in the political economy approach has three dimensions of meaning: (1) meaning the production of “rationally” ordered processes (“Ordnungsdimension”), (2) meaning the construction of an independent social unit or social entity (“Gebildedimension”) and (3) meaning a communitised collective of people who identify with the organisation (“Vergemeinschaftungsdimension”) (cf. Türk et al., 2006, p. 20). As an ordered process, “organization” provides various functional classifications and selections of people, tasks, domains, etc. As an entity, the organization is attributed an actor status, which enables an attribution of productivity and rights to the proceeds and at the same time lifts the organization as an independent entity out of the life world of its members. Finally, through identity formation processes, the aspect of community allows for a social closure, on the one hand, of the relationships of the members of a specific organization, and on the other hand, of the relationships between organizational elites across different organizations (cf. Türk, 1997, p. 174ff.). In particular, the dimensions of order and of entity owe their development to specific historical processes, without which “organization” in the sense intended by the authors would not be possible: Thus, the purposive “rationality” of the organizational order requires specific formations of both governmental knowledge and the psyche of the governed subjects, which are interpreted with terms such as “rationalization”, “civilization” or “disciplining” following the theories of Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Gerhard Oestrich or also Michel Foucault (cf. Bruch, 2000, p. 203ff.; Türk et al., 2006, p. 24f.). The attributability of productivity and rights to the social entity in turn requires certain transformations in the legal understanding of collectives, which ultimately lead to the construction of the “legal person” (cf. Türk et al., 2006, p. 25ff.). According to the authors, these processes, which are closely linked to the emergence of capitalism, begin in the Occident with the early modern period, but only take full effect in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, for Europe one could already speak of organizations since the sixteenth century, because “organization” is interpreted as the conditio sine qua non of modern capitalism (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 132f.; Bruch, 2000, p. 38). This point is crucial for the temporal containment of the organizational phenomenon by the political economy of organization. The rule of “capital” in the Marxian sense of the appropriation of surplus value through the difference between the Gebrauchswert and Tauschwert of labour (cf. Marx, 1962, p. 209) presupposes,

12

1 Introduction

according to Türk and Bruch, “organisation”. It provides the necessary c­ onditioning of the subjects as well as the social mechanisms that make capital accumulation possible (cf. Bruch, 2000, p. 52ff.). And this on at least three levels: (1) organizations such as early modern trading companies, banks, or the state played an essential role in the so-called “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” (original accumulation) of capital and power in the hands of later capitalists, which, according to Marx, is an essential precondition of the capitalist mode of production, (2) the immediate subjection of workers to the production process (“reelle Subsumtion”/real subsumption), which is crucial for capitalism, presupposes organizations as “socially delimitable sites of domination and obedience” (Türk, 1995, pp.  63), and (3) the emergence of capital presupposes the transformation of labour assets into actual labour producing exchange value, which is performed by organisations through their motivational and disciplinary programmes (cf. Türk, 1995, pp. 62ff.). Insofar as Türk and Bruch give “organization”-also contrary to Marx’s own assumptions-a logical and historical priority over capital, organizations of a certain kind, be they only “proto-organizations,” must have already existed at the advent of capitalism in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, with the “Great Transformation”, through which market capitalism finally asserted itself as the determining economic and social factor, the modern “formal organisation” then finally also came to full bloom and to comprehensive dissemination. The authors’ final justification for the temporal restriction of the concept of organization is admittedly less historical than much more normative in nature: for, according to Türk’s argument, if “organization” is otherwise assumed to be historically “universal” and therefore “inescapable”, the prevailing organizational relationship is at the same time affirmed as having no alternative (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 88). Just as Marx’s historically retrospective view of pre-capitalist forms of production essentially served to show that modern, capitalist relations were by no means necessary, but had developed themselves and could therefore also be changed again, Türk’s and Bruch’s historical view of “organization” and its limitation to modern, capitalist society also serves to emphatically demonstrate that it is not at all without any alternatives.9 Even if the analyses of contemporary “organizational society” that Türk and Bruch are able to provide with the help of their differentiated and sociologically comprehensively informed updating of the Marxian approach are very plausible in many respects and  – with regard, for example, to the global subsumption of all people under organizational relations or the associated paradox of formal inclusion and material exclusion (cf. Türk, 1995, pp. 141f.; 1997, p. 161ff.) – provide pro Cf. on this figure of argumentation in Marx and Engels Bloch (2004, p. 10f.).

9

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found insights into current social situations, their argumentation does not provide any compelling reason to restrict the concept of organization to modern society. Nor are essential aspects of their understanding of organization, such as in particular the interests of domination and accumulation attached to “organization” or its instrumental character in the sense of an “extroverted” orientation towards influencing third parties, bound to the present situation, as will be shown. Of course, a definitionally fixed dependence on the specifically occidental processes of rationalization, civilization, or discipline would imply such a limitation; but “civilizing” or “disciplinary” processes – that is, processes that condition subjects psychologically or physically – of various kinds could easily be demonstrated in countless areas of the world at numerous times, in addition to the rationalizations of various kinds already mentioned.10 In particular, the authors’ essential connection between “organization” and capitalism does not allow for a compelling restriction, since it is precisely a logical and historical dependence of capitalism on “organization” and not of “organization” on capitalism. Thus, while according to the authors’ theory there can be no capitalism without organizations, there may well be – at least logically  – organizations without capitalism. It is also questionable to what extent “capitalism” must and can be conceptually limited at all to the modern, bourgeois relations that Marx had in mind. Max Weber, for example, described the existence of certain forms of “capitalism” in the ancient economy very early on – admittedly with a somewhat different definition that was not tied to Marx’s objective theory of value: [One does not have to] limit needlessly the concept of capitalist economy to a single form of valorization of capital – the exploitation of other people’s labour on a contractual basis – and thus to introduce social factors. Instead we should take into account only economic factors. Where we find that property is an object of trade and is utilized by individuals for profit-making enterprise in a market economy, there we have capitalism. If this be accepted, then it becomes perfectly clear that capitalism shaped whole periods of Antiquity, and indeed precisely those periods we call ‘golden ages’. (Weber, 1998, p. 50f.)

Is capitalism understood in this way also tied to the existence of “organization”? Or in other words: what do organizations look like under conditions of such an ancient capitalism? Such questions cannot even be properly formulated if “organization”

 One need only think of the educational institutions of the Spartans or of the regulation of the conduct of Confucian literati in China; here, too, the difference from the present situation is not one of principle, but concerns above all the extent to which today “broad masses” and not merely the warrior aristocracy and the official staff are involved in such processes. 10

14

1 Introduction

remains conceptually limited to the specifically modern-occidental form of ­capitalism. It is not intended to cast doubt on the peculiar structure and the unprecedented spread and disciplinary power of the modern “formal organization” that Türk and Bruch have in mind, any more than on the historically unique character of the specifically occidental processes of rationalization. And it can also make sense from a political-critical point of view to oppose the assertion of an alternativelessness of “organization” and the affirmation of modern relations of domination implied therein11 But just because other, non-organizational or entirely domination-free forms of “co-operation” may have existed alongside “organization” and may therefore exist again, this does not mean that organizations could not have structured human activities in a domineering way much earlier. Even if, as Türk claims, domination is meaningfully conceivable only from a desire for “non-domination” (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 88), this normative perspective still by no means allows us to assume “non-domination” or “non-organization” also factually for historical epochs.

1.1.3 Systems Theory The dominant organizational sociological paradigm in Germany is undoubtedly the systems-theoretical view of organizations based on Niklas Luhmann (cf. Kühl, 2003b, p.  384f.; Tacke, 2010, p.  348ff.).12 Luhmann’s organizational analyses themselves do not form a closed whole, but are in their development closely linked to the formation of his general theory of autopoietic social systems. While his “early” sociology of organisation still aimed at integrating the theories of organisation common at the time on the one hand, and at systematising numerous personal subtle, micro-sociological observations in organisations, especially in administrations, on the other (cf. Göbel, 2000, p. 29), his “late” sociology of organisation is already structured and terminologically adapted according to the aspects of his “autopoietic” systems theory (cf. esp. Luhmann, 2006, p. 39ff.). In addition to the shift from action to communication, this development also corresponds to two different conceptual definitions of “formal organization”. Thus, in his work “Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation”, first published in 1964, Luhmann  Cf. on this already – explicitly without principled limitation of the organization to modernity – Adorno (1972, p. 444f.). 12  In US organizational sociology, this theoretical direction seems to have hardly been taken note of yet. For a first attempt to link systems theory considerations with a neo-institutionalist approach, see Ahrne et al. (2016, p. 94f.). 11

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still defines organizations in terms of action theory as a complex of formal expectations, whereby an expectation is understood as formal if it is regulated by ­membership conditions, “i.e. if there is recognizable consensus that the non-­ recognition or non-fulfillment of this expectation is incompatible with the continuation of membership” (Luhmann, 1999, p. 38). In his late work “Organisation und Entscheidung”, which was only edited posthumously by Dirk Baecker, but which Luhmann had already completed to the point of publication, decision is emphasised as the central criterion of organisation instead of membership, so that – in accordance with Luhmann’s circular style of definition – communication systems generate and reproduce themselves as organisations through recursive networking of and operative closure via communication of decisions (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 63).13 Despite all the further developments within the theory, however, there are also lines of continuity that distinguish Luhmann’s definitions of the concept of organisation equally from the neo-institutionalist and political-economic definitions. Thus, in both of Luhmann’s determinations, organization is located on the “social-­ structural” level of action or communication and not on the level of cultural models or relations of production, which in his terminology would be best captured in the concept of “semantics”. As concrete systems of action or communication, organizations reproduce themselves in Luhmann’s terms through the production and maintenance of a boundary to the outside world – either through the distinction between members and non-members or official and private roles, or through recourse to their own earlier decisions. Moreover, “decision” is already relevant in “early” Luhmann, for example, in the sense of deciding on membership, and membership – among other aspects, such as domination or purpose orientation – is also an important, if not definitional, feature of organizations for “late” Luhmann (cf. Luhmann, 1999, p. 40; 2006, p. 112ff.; Tacke & Drepper, 2018, p. 58). Unlike neo-institutionalism and the political economy of organization, Luhmann’s sociology of organization aims at a generalizing structural analysis of organizations in general and only secondarily at the question of the social and historical significance of the mass appearance of organizations in modernity. Nevertheless, Luhmann also makes a historical restriction of organizations to modernity. For him, however, this seems to be based less on developments at the “semantic” level than on processes of social-structural evolution, i.e. for him above all: on processes of differentiation. In an early lecture (1975 [2019b]) Luhmann  In fact, for the “early” Luhmann, decision communication was specific to administrative organizations as opposed to, say, industrial organizations; only later was it elevated to a general feature of organizations (cf. Luhmann, 2018a, p. 297). 13

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1 Introduction

argues accordingly with a differentiation of various levels or types of social systems: interaction, organization and society, which runs parallel to a socio-cultural evolution from an “archaic social formation”, via “advanced civilization” to modern “world society”: if, according to this, society, organization, and interaction were still identical in “archaic social formations”, and in “advanced civilizations” at least society itself was still an organization capable of acting and deciding on membership, all three levels finally separated in the emergence of today’s “world society” – at least relatively, because organizations of course still reproduce themselves through interactions among those present, and society is still realized in and through organizations and interactions (cf. Luhmann, 2019b, p.  17f.).14 Besides, Luhmann here concedes the existence of some organizations in the urban centers of early “advanced civilizations” – that is, long before modernity (cf. Luhmann, 2019b, p. 18). However, this and similar references remain, as Rena Schwarting puts it, “selective” even in the writings of Luhmann himself and have “received almost no relevant follow-up in research” (Schwarting, 2017, p. 393). In addition to this differentiation of levels, Luhmann considers a functional differentiation of the social structure to be decisive for the formation of organisations. He focuses primarily on developments within functional subsystems, such as the enabling of monetary wages by the economic system or the separation of professional competence and family by the educational system. Organization formation on a “grand scale” gets underway “when society makes it possible to recruit individuals while discarding all the ballast that had limited the imprint of work behavior through origin, group membership, stratification, etc.” (Luhmann, 2006, p. 382). Moreover, only with a functional primacy of differentiation do organisations fulfil necessary functions for society as a whole. On the one hand, in a society whose functional subsystems must in principle be able to include everyone, organisations enable far-reaching exclusions and thus the ability to differentiate (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 392). On the other hand, in functionally differentiated societies only organizations allow “Interdependenzunterbrechungen” (interruptions of interdependence), so that there are no far-reaching inflationary or deflationary chains within and between generalized communication media. According to Luhmann, this can be seen, for example, in the separation of goods markets in the economy, subject areas in politics or specialist areas in science, each of which is covered by its own organisation (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 395). Earlier societies were still able to regulate such interdependence interruptions without organizations through spatial symbols or demarcations. “Tribal” societies, for instance, through their seg For a first mention of this triple schema, see Luhmann (2019a, p. 4ff.); for a later resumption of the argument, see Luhmann (1998, p. 835f.). 14

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mentary mode of differentiation. Stratificational societies possessed for this purpose, in addition to stratification, households within the individual strata and division of labor within the centers. “It is only the modern, functionally d­ ifferentiated society, however, that reaches a degree of complexity in which a completely different type of system formation must take over the function of interdependence interruption” (Luhmann, 2006, p. 396). This notion of a “complementarity” of “organization” and functional primary differentiation remains, in one way or another, crucial for the system theory of organization that follows Luhmann and its narrowing of the concept of organization to modernity (cf. Schwarting, 2017, p. 393f.; 2020, p. 110). Thus, for example, Thomas Drepper argues with a membership-centered concept of organization that there could have been no organizations before modernity because earlier the stratification structures also decided on the membership in guilds or corporations in the sense of a total inclusion of the person (cf. Drepper, 2018, p. 33f.). More strongly, Drepper emphasizes that there was no line of continuity between pre-modern forms of corporations and modern organizations – just as there was no line of continuity between pre-modern households and modern families: “The families and organizations of modern society have no predecessors, and the households and corporations have no successors” (Drepper, 2018, p. 35). This assertion, which is hardly tenable in terms of historical logic, also contains an analytical disconnect: the consideration of pre-modern social forms is not necessary for the analysis of modern organizations or even families, and is only of very limited use. Stefan Kühl argues along very similar lines. Following the later Luhmann, he sees membership as a necessary but not sufficient criterion of organisations, because in other social forms, such as groups, social movements or families, there can also be found a distinction between members and non-members (cf. Kühl, 2014, p. 69). The specific feature of organizations is therefore the autonomous decision or the conditioning of membership by decision (Kühl, 2014, p. 70; cf. 2020, p. 21). Accordingly, modern organisations differed from pre-modern social forms primarily in that they are not based on total inclusion and “compulsory membership”, but can recruit members differentially and partially include them via “free labour markets” (cf. Kühl, 2020, p. 15f.). For this, as was already the case for Luhmann himself and Drepper, a social liberation of individuals from their “traditional” ties was necessary: “Only with the liberation from a social formation shaped by tribal and class membership did it become possible for individuals to increasingly differentiate memberships in different and independent social systems” (Kühl, 2019, p. 106). Veronika Tacke and Drepper argue somewhat differently in their theoretical-­ historical overview. According to them, organizations occur in small numbers  –

18

1 Introduction

quite in line with Luhmann’s selective remarks – even in pre-modern societies. The different forms of participation in organizations – full inclusion in pre-modern societies, partial inclusion in modernity – differentiated between different forms of organization, but were not decisive for the concept of organization itself (cf. Tacke & Drepper, 2018, p. 82). Despite this clearly more differentiated initial argumentation, however, the concept of organization remains mostly reserved for the specifically “modern” form, even for Tacke and Drepper, and “modern organization formation” is tied to specific, functionally differentiating development processes. And here, too, the conceptual separation of pre-modern and modern forms of organization and the claimed historical discontinuity between the two allows for an exclusive consideration of “modern organization” (cf. Tacke & Drepper, 2018, pp. 83ff.). In Luhmann’s own work, as well as within systems-theoretical organization theory, it is thus essentially the transition from stratificational differentiation to functional differentiation on the one hand, and the differentiation of organization between interaction and society on the other, that suggests a historical restriction of “organization” to modern, functionally differentiated society. In this respect, it is less the definitional features of organization as such than its embedding in societal theory that is decisive. Therefore, the following critique is not so much aimed at the systems-theoretical concept of organization, which in itself could perhaps also be made fruitful for an analysis of pre-modern organizations, but rather at the basic argumentation of differentiation theory. Here, in particular, the image of a lack of level differentiation in “archaic” and “advanced civilization” societies does not seem very adequate. If one assumes Luhmann’s concept of society as “the comprehensive social system that includes all other social systems within itself” (Luhmann, 1998, p. 78), then even in “archaic” societies it does not as a rule correspond to the political “organizational unit” “tribe” or “local group”, which could autonomously decide on its memberships and plan its internal social structure, but rather to the comprehensive network of economic, martial, kinship or ritual relations. Lineages, moitiés, warrior and cult alliances represent further demarcation within and across “tribes”. The isolated “tribe”, which at the same time embodies a social, organisational and interaction system, has historically and ethnographically, if it ever existed at all, been rather the exception; after Malinowski, this should have been made clear at the latest by the studies of Edmund Leach or Fredrik Barth (cf. for example Barth, 1956, p. 1079; Leach, 1970, p. 5ff.). Moreover, the possibility and de facto strategic use of adoption clearly complicate the inclusion relations of archaic societies (cf. Barth, 1969, p. 22). Likewise, as historian Otto Gerhard Oexle has pointed out, the idea of a class-­ based total inclusion in medieval society that Luhmann and his epigones imply is inadequate:

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by no means is medieval society only ‘segmentary’ or only ‘stratificational’; rather, even in the Middle Ages the individual is found in a variety of group-based identities: in family, home, gender, certainly, – but also in craft guild, merchant guild, brotherhood, commune, and other forms of consensus-based, group-based contractual relationship and ‘fraternizations’. (Oexle, 1991, p. 62)

In this context, there had already been clear tensions in the Middle Ages between the quasi-natural corporative or familial ties on the one hand and the “artificial”, contractual ties on the other (cf. Oexle, 1991, p. 62f.). Stratificatory differentiation, then, could not be seen as a fully integrating system that alone decided who entered the medieval corporate forms. Rather, the Middle Ages were already characterized in many aspects by “modernity” and complex internal contradictions (cf. Oexle, 1991, p. 64; cf. also Steckel, 2013, p. 351). If instead of the “reductions” already aimed at modernization, one applies such a more complex picture of the “archaic” or “medieval”, the system-theoretical arguments of a restriction of organizations to modernity seem to lose their hold. In particular, when individual freedoms, differential inclusions, conflicting role or group references, or contractual forms of membership can already be made plausible for pre-modern conditions, organizations cannot be ruled out for pre-modern times even in the sense of the system-theoretical definitions of concepts.15 In this context, the methodological justification, if not the necessity, of describing empirically complex phenomena according to certain aspects by means of unilateral, theoretical schemes, or of making them describable in the first place by reducing complexity, is by no means to be disputed. Thus, for example, the medieval “form of rank differentiation”, as Luhmann himself states against Oexle’s criticism, can justifiably be understood as a “counter-concept” when “it is a matter of the genesis of the function-oriented [modern] form of social differentiation” (Luhmann, 1991, p. 67). However, if one sees differentiation models in this sense as purely theoretical constructions that can only penetrate the empirical world according to specific, theory-guided viewpoints, but cannot represent it in its empirical richness – or with Weber: if one sees them as ideal types – they cannot provide a valid justification for a factual non-existence of organizations in earlier social formations. Rather, one could ask – with likewise specifically reductive and one-sided conceptualizations – to what extent one can speak of organizations here as well, under which aspects they resemble today’s organizations and in what they typically deviate.

 Thus, even in the medieval guild – a typical key witness for the argument of the non-organized nature of pre-modern associations – there was certainly wage labor and differential inclusion of members (cf. Heusinger, 2009, p. 61). 15

20

1 Introduction

Neo-institutionalist, political-economic and systems-theoretical sociology of organization, however different they may otherwise be, tie “organization” to ­modernity. Moreover, they link the emergence of “organization” to the emergence of modern – or, as in the case of Bromley and Meyer postmodern – conditions, whether these are described as “world society,” “capitalism,” “functional differentiation,” or whatever else. “Organization” in this respect roots clearly in modernisation-­theory for substantial parts of the German sociology of organization today. This is already evident in the fact that for the historical delimitation of “organization” usually only the European “Middle Ages” is brought in, which conceptually since its “invention” by the humanists of the Renaissance can be regarded as preloaded with modernization theory (cf. Oexle, 2013, p. 6f.). If one isolates the conceptual determinations from the respective assumptions of modernization theory, however, a limitation to modernity seems less plausible. Without the “historical-­ philosophical” framework of the concept of modernization (cf. Lepsius, 1990, pp.  213f.), the various concepts of organization include different abstract sociological determinations, such as “institutional” rationalizations, planning rationality of action, extroverse and introverse relations of domination, or autonomy of decision-­making over membership, hierarchy, and purposes, which in themselves are not yet tied to any particular social formation. Why does organizational sociology nevertheless insist on the modernity of “organization”?

1.1.4 History of Terms A look at the history of the term shows that “organisation” in its application to social and political conditions can already be regarded as modernisation-theory from the very beginning. It is first attested in the Neo-Latin formation “organisatio”, derived from the Greek ὄργανον, meaning “tool, device, instrument”, in medical terminology since the fourteenth century in the sense of the modern “organism” concept. Here it served to describe natural bodies. In the course of the spread of a “technomorphic” or “mechanical” image of nature since Descartes and Newton it initially stood only blurredly delineated alongside a mechanism metaphor for describing nature. It is only since the end of the eighteenth century that, with the differentiation of scientific biology, the meanings of “organism” and “mechanism” also diverge more clearly (cf. Meyer, 1969, p. 129f.; Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 557ff.). The metaphorical transfer of terms used to describe nature to political or social conditions can already be documented in Plato’s philosophy of the state. In the European Middle Ages, this can be seen above all in the term “corpus”, which was

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used, among other things, to describe the church, the empire, national or state entities, cities and municipalities and other “corporation-like” groups (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, pp. 522f., 539). Semantically, the functional assignment of partial services to a whole as well as the hierarchical subordination of the body to a “head” (caput) played a particularly formative role (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, pp. 537f.). With the modern era and the assertion of a “mechanistic” conception of nature, the metaphor of the body in its application to political relations also comes into the field of tension between “organism” and “mechanism”. Thus, for example, Hobbes or Rousseau with the concept of the “corpus politicum” already imply, in addition to the assignment of organ functions to a whole, the idea of the conscious production of an artificial living being modelled on a machine (cf. Meyer, 1969, pp.  137, 142; Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, pp. 555f.). It was not until the nineteenth century, with the establishment of biology, that the “organicist” conception of political and social relations also broke away from the “mechanist” one – an essential intellectual prerequisite of sociology, which, according to Ahlrich Meyer, is historically based on a “biologisches Hintergrundmodell” (Meyer, 1969, p. 134). According to Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Gerhard Bohrn-van Rossum, the use of the concept of “organization” for political and social relations begins “approximately simultaneously with the French Revolution and essentially also through it” (Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 566; cf. also Türk et al., 2006, p. 100ff.). In contrast to André Kieserling’s interpretation, the focus here is by no means on the “emphasis on natural growth”, but on the contrary on the idea of a complete reshaping of the social order through conscious, planned action (cf. Kieserling, 2005, p. 59; Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 566). This also shapes, in particular, the early meaning of the term in German, which is closely related to the restructuring of the annexed territories on the left bank of the Rhine, and from this acquires a pejorative secondary sense as typically French (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 567). “To organize,” as Klaus Türk notes, is also ironically recorded in a dictionary in Germany at the time as “To set up a country in the French way” (cf. Türk, 1995, p. 154). The “cult of reason” of the French Revolution, which found expression, for example, in the development of a “rational” calendar, a rededication of churches to temples of reason, and the introduction of a “rational” instrument of killing, the guillotine, also shaped the concept of organization in the direction of a tradition-independent “rationality” of consciously planned social and political conditions (cf. Breuer, 1993, p. 165). One could trace here a process of political theology: just as God appeared as the author of the organization of nature, man is now seen as the organizer of his political institutions (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 569).

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In German, the term soon freed itself from its Francophobic connotations and, in the course of Stein’s and Hardenberg’s reforms, established itself primarily as a term in legal context. In the process, the double meaning that the term had already assumed in the French Revolution was retained: “on the one hand, the designation of the internal establishment, responsibilities and the order of the course of business of authorities, on the other hand, the designation of more far-reaching reorganizations, be it of the structure of authorities as a whole, be it of the state order as a whole” (Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 575f.). In Kant’s and the German idealists’ philosophical reflection on the state, the concept of organization recedes into the background in comparison to the concept of organism. In the concept of organism, the relationship of the parts among themselves and to their whole is grasped here in particular; the dynamic-active side of the conscious creation of a new order, on the other hand, loses significance (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 580ff.). Romanticism then increasingly combines the organicist conception of the state with an opposition to ideas of a political design of the same (cf. Meyer, 1969, p. 154f.; Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 603f.).) The idea of a contrast between the technical, contract-theoretically conceived state and the living, natural people is expressed, among other things, in a juxtaposition of the terms “organization” and “organism” (cf. Meyer, 1969, p. 156; Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 609). The implied critical-conservative connotation of “organization” as something artificial, unnatural, remains important for the further development of the term to this day. In terms of social history, the nineteenth century, according to Werner Conze, was characterized throughout Europe by “decorporization”: “everywhere, the manifold corporate institutions of the nobility, the scholars, the merchants, the artisans, the peasants were dissolved, loosened, transformed, or diminished in their constitutive significance for the constitution. Estates, traditional thinking, social segregation were challenged, abolished, described as meaningless, or ideologically defended in defensive positions” (Conze, 1958, p.  10). Individuals broke away en masse from their traditional ties and were given the opportunity to unite on a voluntary basis. In the discussion about the necessary changes in the existing society, the concept of organization was transferred from the state and administration to other political and social entities by different actors – by the early socialists around Henri de Saint-Simon as well as by conservative critics and Christian reform movements. This gave it an additional meaning as a purposeful association of wills: “Organization arises from the union of many who pursue the same purposes, appears as an active-dynamic interrelationship of wills, becomes fully a concept of movement”; the point of reference was “the production of an associative, group-­ like power of action and will for changing/asserting social conditions and repre-

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senting one’s own interests; the organization becomes an entity capable of action, capable of being directed towards goals, becomes an association of wills” ­(Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 613). At the same time, this marks the beginning of the differentiation of levels between society and organisation described by systems theory, so that it is not society as a whole but individual associations that are described as “organised” and thus as “organisations” in the sociological sense of the term – although even today a distinction is not always made consistently between the two levels (cf. Kieserling, 2005, p. 59). The further detachment of the concept of organisation from the state and politics is already taking place within the framework of the development of the newly emerged social sciences. In addition to sociology, it is in particular business administration that takes up the concept and develops it further (cf. Böckenförde & Dohrn-van Rossum, 1978, p. 620f.). However, it soon settled on terms like “enterprise”, “company” or “business” as the designation of its object, whereby the term “organisation” became free to designate the structure of the system “company” and, as a rule, did not designate the system itself, as intended here in the sociological sense of organisation (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 302). This is also characteristic of later business studies, for example in Erich Kosiol: “Enterprises require organisation in order to fulfil their tasks.” A few lines later, on the other hand, it says: “The enterprise itself as a social entity can also be understood as an organization” (Kosiol, 1976, p. 15). The concept of organization thus retains an ambiguity even within business management usage, which it also cannot quite get rid of in the sociological and everyday sense: (1) organization as a structural property of social systems (organizedness; “structural concept” of organization), (2) organization as a concrete social system (an organization, organizations; “system concept” of organization) (cf. Schwarting, 2020, p. 111ff.). The systems concept of organization, as it is used here as the object designation of modern organizational sociology, developed primarily in the USA. The particular combination of social and intellectual historical conditions that made the USA the birthplace of organizational sociology cannot be discussed in detail here. The lack of class institutions and state-philosophical traditions, the decentralized federalist system of government, and deep-seated liberalist values probably played a role in the fact that, on the one hand, very complex, large associations of wills emerged here comparatively early, and that, on the other hand, these were soon analyzed with the help of the modern concept of organization. As Yehouda Shenhav shows, it was mainly engineering scientists who, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, began to analyse and plan the newly emerging entities under the concept of organisation as a system  – under a clearly mechanistic premises (cf. Shenhav, 1995, p. 560ff.). Parallel developments in different functional areas, such

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1 Introduction

as education, health or business, were homogenised and systematised into various archetypal organisational models, which, in line with the neo-institutionalist ­conception, became models for further organisational formations (cf. Scott, 2014, p. 89). It was above all the field of economics that played a decisive role for the emerging “organization studies”. Here, the American history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is characterized by the emergence and rise in importance of industrial concerns organized as joint stock companies, which in size and complexity soon exceeded the scale of manageable social units (cf. Perrow, 2002, p. 198ff.). As the American anthropologist David Graeber notes, following Max Weber, these large corporations were initially interpreted primarily in terms of state bureaucracy and structured accordingly, so that one could certainly speak of “private bureaucracies” (cf. Graeber, 2015, p. 11f.). Perhaps this is part of the reason why Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic rule was initially so enthusiastically received in the USA and quickly turned into practice. Alongside Weber, it was in particular the idea of “scientific management” developed by the engineer Frederick Taylor, a rationally optimised planning of the immediate work process analysed down to the smallest detail, which became the essential point of reference for “organisation studies” (cf. Shenhav, 1995, p. 562). Correspondingly, the American “organization studies” – and after them the international sociology of organization – understand by “organization”, following the model of the industrial, bureaucratic large corporation, complex, rationally ordered and therefore efficient special-purpose associations, mostly private enterprises, established by scientific planning. This rational or “machine model” of the organization, supposedly laid out in equal measure by Weber and Taylor, remains to this day, despite all further theoretical and metaphorical development, determinative at least for the everyday understanding and in parts also for the scientific understanding of organizations (cf. Scott, 2003, p. 34ff.; Morgan, 2006, p. 13). In line with the commercial models, the meaning of the organization as a relatively autonomous association of wills continues to develop, so that James S. Coleman, for example, speaks of “corporate actors” with regard to what is referred to here as an organization, which have their own capacity to act that is not fully determined by state or other powers of command (cf. Coleman, 1982, p. 63) – a conception that, as has been shown, has been taken up by neo-­ institutionalism and the political economy of the organization, among others. From the very beginning, as a look at the history of the term should show, the concept of organization is formed by modernization-theory. Initially at the level of the state and society, and later also at the level of “smaller” associations, it always intends to distinguish itself from earlier social forms that were assumed to be “natural” or “traditional”, such as the order of the estates of the ancien régime or the

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medieval, personal forms of corporations. It is based on the idea of a rational, empirically founded institution of human coexistence. Typical of ­modernization-­theory, it seeks its model not in the past but in the idea of a rational order that can only be realized in the future. Hence also the close connection of the concept of organization with the concept of planning (cf. Tenbruck, 1972, p.  48; Luhmann, 2020, p. 87f.). Since its emergence in the French Revolution, the political-social concept of organisation has contained (1) the idea of a functional order of parts towards a whole and (2) the idea of the availability and intentional constructability of social order. This intentional meaning of organization holds true even if one identifies, beyond the planned “formal organization”, an unintended “informal organization” that potentially runs counter to planning or, on the contrary, is functionally necessary, as a weighty, if not even central, factor, since this is only conceivable from the idea and practical establishment of planned formality (cf. Luhmann, 1999, p. 268). Further aspects of the meaning of “organization” develop in the course of scientific reflection on social associations, especially in the USA. Here, organisations are (3) conceived as social systems with a boundary, which (4) are subject to a rational systematics justified by scientific means and (5) possess their own collective capacity to act as autonomous associations of wills. The concept of organization outlined in this way is, on the one hand, itself a product of the historical phase of “modernity”; on the other hand, it is a modernization-­theory in its underlying intention, oriented towards overcoming “traditionality”. Nevertheless, this does not answer the question of the existence of “pre-modern” organizations. Just because a concept first emerges in modernity and originally has implications that derive from modernization-theory, this does not mean that it cannot also be applied to non-modern societies – otherwise concepts such as “society”, “civilization” or “state” could also not be applied to “pre-­ modern” conditions. Moreover, there have been “modern” tendencies in numerous phases of human history, in the sense that individuals or collectives have opposed traditional norms and orders and have attempted to consciously change them in founding and reforming acts.

2

Max Weber and the Sociology of Organization

As has been shown, the sociology of organization developed primarily in the USA, from where it was imported to Germany primarily by Niklas Luhmann and Renate Mayntz from the 1960s onwards. One, if not the central, point of reference for early US organizational sociology is Max Weber’s sociology of rule.1 This is surprising in that Weber cannot easily be considered an organizational sociologist. He neither provided nor, as far as I know, anywhere aimed at a generalizing analysis of organizations as such. In his sociology, as at least Renate Mayntz thinks, there is no category that would be congruent with the concept of organization in modern organizational sociology (cf. Mayntz, 1968, p. 28). Also the German term “Organisation” is not systematically introduced by him and is mostly used in the sense of the structural term to describe the particular structure of a social system or in the sense of a process of coordination of actions – thus in any case not in the sense of the system term of modern sociology of organization – for instance when he speaks of an “organisation of the economy” in the sense of the respective typical distribution of power of disposal or also when he speaks of the capitalist “formally purely voluntaristic organisation of labour” – both times with reference to the structure not even of a closed system but of an economic order resp. “broad masses” (cf. Weber, 2019, pp. 45, 283). Nevertheless, Karl Gabriel, for instance, sees – and, it seems, not entirely wrongly! –in Max Weber a theorist of the “organizational society”,

 In his biography of Weber, Jürgen Kaube judges that the history of organizational sociology, “initiated by Weber, represents a single critique of his machine analogy and his picture of hierarchical control” (Kaube, 2014, p. 262). W. Richard Scott even judges that Max Weber’s influence on organizational theory was evident from the beginning – “indeed, in many ways it was the beginning!” (Scott, 2003, p. 166). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 P. Jakobs, Max Weber and the sociology of organization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7_2

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focusing in particular on Weber’s concepts of the “organization of rationally trained specialist officials” and the “rational organization of labor” (cf. Gabriel, 1979, pp. 29ff.).

2.1 On the Reception of Max Weber in Organizational Sociology While the “rational organization of labor” was hardly received at all, not only within organizational sociology, the “organization of rationally trained specialist officials” or the “bureaucratic administrative staff” was virtually absorbed by early US organizational sociology (cf. for example Merton, 1940, p.  560f.; Selznick, 1943, p. 49f.; Blau, 1952, p. IIf., 5f.; Gouldner, 1954, p. 18ff.). However, under the aegis of Talcott Parsons’ structural-functionalist interpretation of Weber, the latter proceeded in an extremely selective manner and reinterpreted the ideal type of bureaucracy, which in Weber’s view stood in a historical context directed at extensive social and cultural developments, into an analytical tool for organizations in general, describing them from the perspective of the practical increase of production efficiency (cf. Swedberg, 2003, pp. 92f.). The resulting notion of a practical superiority of bureaucratic orders was viewed critically at the latest after Elton Mayo’s investigations and the “discovery” of the existence and functional necessity of “informal” factors of organization. The rational bureaucracy with its fixed official hierarchy, its defined official competences and its rigorous and uniform official discipline and supervision (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 347f.) – the momentous image of the “iron cage” coined by Parsons in his translation of Protestant ethics does not seem inappropriate here either – not only seemed hardly to be the most efficient solution to numerous problems of organization, but, when consistently implemented, even caused serious inefficiencies (cf. Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1949, p. 540ff.; cf. also Schluchter, 1985, p. 136ff.). Early German organizational sociology adopted the selective Weberian interpretation of the concept of organization from the USA relatively uncritically. Thus, for example, Renate Mayntz, despite all the criticism she otherwise makes against the organizational sociological appropriation of Weber, interprets the bureaucracy type as an “objective type of correctness”, which, following directly on from Weber’s action type of purpose rationality, describes bureaucracy as the theoretically most efficient means of achieving given organizational purposes, and in doing so fails to recognise the distinction between action and formal rationality that was

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central to Weber (cf. Mayntz, 1968, p. 28).2 For Weber, there is no direct route from the determinants of social action, which include purposive rationality, to the legitimacy grounds of rule, in the context of which the formal rationality of bureaucratic administration stands. Rather, he makes it clear that the determinants alone are not sufficient to stabilize rule and that legitimacy must be added as a third element (cf. Weber, 2019, p.  339; cf. also Tyrell, 1981, p.  39f.; Breuer, 1997, p.  108; 2011, p. 20). In a very similar vein, Niklas Luhmann also criticizes Weber’s “sociology of organization” as being too rigidly fixated on purposive rationality and chains of command, ignoring the informal, purposeless side of organizational reality as well as the relative autonomy of subordinates (cf. Luhmann, 2018b, pp. 157ff., 166f.). In doing so, Luhmann also conflates formal rationality and purposive rationality and fails to recognize the dynamic character of the ideal-typical conceptualization, which depends on the respective epistemological interest and which at least did not prevent Weber from the early identification of an informal side of formalized purposive organizations, as can be seen, for example, in the following quote: Even the most soberly conceived and directed purposively rational association (e.g., of retailer and customers) can evoke an emotional allegiance that transcends its chosen purpose. Any longterm social relationships between the same members of such a purposive association, but which transcend that association, a  sociation that is not from the very first strictly limited to particular individual activities […] tends in some way in this direction, although of course in quite various ways. (Weber, 2019, p. 121)

Even if the ideal type “bureaucracy” does not itself contain such forms of “communalisation”, as an ideal type it does not at all claim to represent social reality in all its facets, and therefore exclude the possibility of the existence and consideration of “informal structures”. And for Luhmann, too, as has been shown, the “formal” order, whether characterized as formalized membership or as recursive decision-­making, remains the defining criterion for “organization”, without the

 For a highly instructive critique of this interpretation, see Tyrell (1981, p. 46f.).

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2  Max Weber and the Sociology of Organization

“informal” side or the “undecided decision premises” therefore becoming ­unimportant.3 Both US and German organizational sociology thus misinterpret Weber’s description of bureaucracy as an early example of a general theory of organization. Under this sign, the characterization of bureaucracy as “the most formally rational way of exercising rule”, because it “provides precision, consistency, discipline, rigour, reliability, and hence predictability, for rulers as well as other interested parties” and because of “the intensity and scope of work done, its formally universal applicability to all tasks, and its very high degree of technical perfection” (Weber, 2019, p. 350) can certainly be read in the sense of a practically superior production or output efficiency – although, on closer inspection, it is probably primarily a matter of marking superior “ruling efficiency” (Herrschaftseffizienz), to use an expression by Michael Bruch (cf. Bruch, 2000, p.  51). Accordingly, Wolfgang Schluchter still assumes that Weber “basically recommends bureaucratization and bureaucratic organization as the best strategy and the best ‘means’ for translating arbitrary organizational goals into everyday life” (Schluchter, 1985, p. 138, emphasis mine, PJ.). Even though Weber made it clear on several occasions that he was convinced of the purely technical superiority of modern bureaucratic administration – a conviction that in itself was and is by no means unjustly criticized4 – he also knew the price that modern man had to pay for it, and nothing may have been further from his mind than recommending bureaucratization to any state or private-­sector administration, or even outlining a practical theory of how effi The extent to which Weber’s material analyses already anticipate Luhmann’s insights into organizational sociology with regard to informal structures – without, of course, achieving (or even striving for) a comparable degree of generalization and theoretical systematization – can be seen, for example, in his debate speech at the Vienna conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1909, which he concludes with the remark that a “business officialdom stripped of its divine nimbus” and susceptible to corruption, such as he thinks he can identify in the USA, England or France, is under certain circumstances more “efficient” than the “highly moral, authoritarian transfigured German officialdom” (Weber, 1988b, p. 416). The echoes of Luhmann’s notion of “usable illegality” are hard to ignore. Weber’s purely powerpolitical value considerations, towards which “illegality” is supposed to be more efficient than rigid conformity, are admittedly different from those of Luhmann, who relates the concept to the problems of adaptation and self-preservation of organizations in general. Structurally, however, they are descriptions of the same phenomenon. 4  Of course, such a critique must not forget that the formal type of bureaucracy alone was not sufficient for Weber to justify the “superiority” of occidental forms of organization, but that he sought above all to emphasize the extra-organizational, especially religious, preconditions of civil service discipline, which remains a central component of the efficiency of bureaucracies. 3

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ciency might be increased. Thus, in a debate speech he delivered at the Vienna meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) in 1909, the statement made about bureaucracy that there is “nothing in the world, no machinery in the world, that works as precisely as this human machine does” is followed by the opinion, delivered with quite some pathos, that “the central question” is not “how we further promote and accelerate this, but what we have to oppose this machinery in order to keep a remnant of humanity free from this parcelling of the soul, from this autocracy of bureaucratic ideals of life” (Weber, 1988b, pp. 413f.).5 It takes greater selective effort to expect this view to offer technical advice on the most efficient set-up of an organization and to place Weber’s type of bureaucracy ­alongside the “scientific management” of Fredrick Taylor, as early organizational sociology did – affirmatively or critically. In this context, the universal-historical background of the bureaucratic type, which in the words of Hartmann Tyrell is “an individualizing type” that “has in its sights the specifically occidental structural form of rule as the reality to which it relates” (Tyrell, 1981, p. 44), is closely connected with the normative thrust aimed at the “fate” of humanity. Weber was not concerned with the structural description and technical efficiency of bureaucratic organizations as such, but rather with the cultural significance and consequences of the mass spread of such “modern” forms of organization and the type of person they help to produce, their specific “inescapability” (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 350f.; cf. also Hennis, 1987, p. 57f.).

2.2 Bureaucracy and Rational Organization of Labor as Organizations Even if Max Weber cannot actually be regarded as an organizational sociologist in the modern sense in this respect, there are numerous points of contact in his description of the bureaucratic administrative staff as well as in the concept of the “modern rational work organization”, which he elaborated less systematically and received considerably less, that would certainly justify inclusion by early organizational sociology within certain limits. And in particular, both the description of bureaucracy as the “specifically modern form of administration” (Weber, 2019, p. 343) and the explicit confinement of rational organization of labor to occidental capitalism (cf. Weber, 1950, p. 312) seem to favor a interpretation of the organizational phenomenon in terms of modernization theory.  For a recent, quite elegant attempt to interpret Weber’s work from such critical-normative positions, see Marty (2020, p. 22ff.). 5

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2.2.1 “Bureaucratic Rule” The type of bureaucracy or the bureaucratic administrative staff appears in Weber as the purest type of rational-legal rule within his typology of rule. Rulership, according to Weber, presupposes a “specific minimum of willingness to obey, hence an (outward or inner) interest in obedience”. This willingness to obey is usually secured in a rule, on the one hand, by an administrative staff that adjusts its actions “to the execution of general directions and substantive commands”, and, on the other hand, by a specific belief in legitimacy on the part of those who obey, which corresponds to a specific claim to legitimacy on the part of the rule (Weber, 2019, p. 338f.). In this context, the legitimating relationship between the ruler and his administrative staff in particular is decisive for the character of the rule; the claim to legitimacy vis-à-vis the other ruled, on the other hand, is of secondary importance, may sometimes even be absent altogether, and the rule over them is based on a mere threat of violence (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 340f.). The legitimacy of “legal” or “rational rule” is based, according to Weber, on “a belief in the legality of statutory orders and the right of those appointed to exercise rule to give directions (legal rule)”. In contrast to “traditional rule”, which is based on “piety and familiarity with the person of the ruler appointed by tradition (and bound by it)” or to “charismatic rule” that ensures obedience “by virtue of personal trust in revelation, heroism, or exemplary qualities” towards the “charismatic leader”, legal rule is characterized precisely by the impersonality of the order, which still subjugates even the superior and limits the perimeter of his legitimate orders (Weber, 2019, pp. 351f., emphasis mine, PJ.). The essential features of legal rule are, on the one hand, the propositionality of relatively arbitrary legal norms, and, on the other hand, the notion that this law forms a coherent system or a “cosmos of abstract rules” (Weber, 2019, p. 343; cf. Tyrell, 1981, p. 46ff.; Breuer, 2011, p. 206f.). According to Weber, it is realized in its purest form through a bureaucratic administrative staff consisting of personally free, rationally trained and specialized “individual officials” bound only factually by contract, who stand in a fixed official hierarchy with fixed competences, are separated from the “administrative means”, and are “subordinate to rigorous and uniform official discipline and supervision” (Weber, 2019, p. 347f.). Although Weber may have had primarily the centralized institutional state (zentralisierter Anstaltsstaat) of his time in mind with the type of rational rule, it is also, “in principle, applicable to enterprises pursuing commercial, charitable, or any other kind of private ideals or material aims, […] to political or hierocratic organisations” (Weber, 2019, p. 348). According to Weber, bureaucratic administrative staffs can also be traced in companies, clinics, churches

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or the army. In this respect, the concept of bureaucracy is quite close to the concept of “organization” as developed above on the basis of organizational sociological theories and conceptual history, both in its scope and in its content, especially with regard to the rational “availability” of a set order and the “division of labor” of individual services according to competencies.6 The bureaucracy type also provides support for a interpretation of “organization” based on modernization theory. In particular, its connection to the type of rational-legal rule suggests an interpretation of it as a specific feature of occidental modernity, for rational-legal rule is regarded by Weber as a specifically occidental type of rule, which only appeared here alongside the other types of rule as a result of the victory of “formalistic legal rationalism” (cf. Weber, 1988a, p. 272). While statutory law and officialdom, as well as specific ways of innovating the legal order, existed, according to Weber, very early on and also within traditional ruling associations (cf. Weber, 2019, pp.  355, 378, 402), these nevertheless remained within the always circumscribed, unavailable horizon of tradition, which kept the ruler’s actions within a “duality” (Doppelreich), where it is “(a) on the one hand, bound substantively to tradition; (b) on the other, substantively free of tradition” (Weber, 2019, p. 355). In Weber’s view, however, one could only speak of rational or legal rule, according to Stefan Breuer, “when the duality (Doppelreich) of traditional rule is broken down, when the principle of positivity is also extended to the legitimizing foundations of norm-setting, that is, when the order as a whole is thought of as being set by decision” (Breuer, 1997, p. 115). This required a combination of various developments within religion, law, politics, and economics, of which bureaucratization was only one aspect, which existed in its specific combination only in the Occident, and which broke through here only with the modern era and fully with the rise of modern corporate capitalism (cf. Schluchter, 1979, p. 254; Breuer, 2011, p. 212ff.). These processes had an effect, among other things, with regard to the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus, but at the same time also with regard to the production of a bureaucratic “habitus” or a bureaucratic “attitude” among the officials and the ruled – with regard to processes of disciplining, civilization, etc., in other words, which, as already mentioned above, also make it  The closedness as a social system is already contained in Weber’s concept of the “organisation” (Verband). Only the autonomy and autonomous capacity to act seems to contradict Weber’s concept of bureaucracy, since at the head of his bureaucracies there is typically no rationally trained bureaucrat, but a hereditary or official charismatic ruler standing outside the bureaucratic order (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 401). However, the dependence of bureaucratic rule on specialist and official knowledge in particular often causes a tendency for the bureaucratic apparatus to become independent of its master, whereby it itself gains autonomy and, so to speak, collective “agency” (cf. Breuer, 1997, p. 121f.). 6

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necessary for Türk and Bruch to conceptually restrict “organization” to modernity (cf. Weber, 2009, p.  35; cf. also Breuer, 1997, p.  121). Their interpretation of ­modernity and the specific modernity of “organization”, which in many places also explicitly follows Weber, is in this respect in many aspects definitely in his sense. But even if rational legitimacy in a fundamental sense is for Weber limited to occidental modernity, for him bureaucratic administrative staffs also exist in other systems of rule at other times. Thus, according to him, wherever the “[a]appointment by contract” through “free selection” that is essential to modern bureaucracy is absent, but “unfree officials” nevertheless “are placed in a hierarchy with material competences – in a formally bureaucratic manner” one can speak of a “patrimonial bureaucracy” (Weber, 2019, p. 349). For Weber, the background for bureaucratic administrative staffs of all kinds is the “chronic latent struggle” of the patrimonial ruler with “the holders or usurpers of estates appropriated lordly rights” for these very lordly rights, which existed “everywhere” (Weber, 2019, p. 394; 1988a, p. 271; cf. Breuer, 1997, p. 115). The lord could only win this battle by creating his own administrative staff and equipping it with administrative resources (finances, magazines, and arsenals), although the type of officials varied greatly historically: patrimonial ministerials, i.e. non-free household officials, in the Occidental Middle Ages or in the household of the Shōgun in Japan, extrapatrimonial literati, such as the Confucian humanists in China or the Christian clerics of the Middle Ages, or precisely professionally trained jurists, as they became established only in the modern Occident (cf. Weber, 1988a, p. 271f.; 2019, p. 395f.). In this respect, it seems to have been conceivable for Weber that, in addition to the modern, occidental legal bureaucracy, there were also pre-modern and non-­ occidental patrimonial, clerical, or literary bureaucracies – even if central characteristics of the bureaucracy type, such as monetary remuneration or free selection of officials, probably do not apply to most of these forms. Irrespective of whether one can consistently speak of “bureaucracies” in Weber’s narrower sense, the concept of bureaucracy used by Weber is not identical with that of organization. It is precisely in its juxtaposition with the historically specific forms of bureaucratic administration that the latter is given a clear profile as an umbrella term that is not otherwise to be found in Weber’s work and that is not bound to a particular epoch or a particular form of rule: “For all forms of rule, the existence of the administrative staff and the continuing action it takes to assure the execution and enforcement of orders is vital to the maintenance of deference. The existence of this action is what is meant by the word ‘organisation’” (Weber,

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2019, p.  402).7 “Bureaucracy” in general, and even more so “organization,” are thus for Weber, in contrast to modern bureaucracy, to whose characterization the reception of organizational sociology is largely limited, not limited to “rational rule” and thus historically not limited to occidental modernity.

2.2.2 Rational Organisation of Work The other aspect of Weber’s work that seems to offer points of connection for organizational sociology is his characterization of the modern economic order as corporate capitalism and the concept of “rational work organization” that is central to it. In fact, a reception of this line of thought remains largely absent within organizational sociology and, at least in comparison to the reception of the bureaucracy type, clearly takes a back seat (cf. Swedberg, 2003, p. 89). This is surprising insofar as the early US-American organization research and its orientation towards production efficiency could be accused of an economistic bias. Moreover, a translation of the transcripts of Weber’s lecture “Abriß der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte” (General Economic History), in which the “rational organization of labor” in contrast to “bureaucracy” occurs in a central place, was already available in 1927 and thus several years before Parsons’ partial translation of “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” (The Theory of Social and Economic Organization) (1947), in which the bureaucracy type is treated in detail (cf. Tribe, 2007, p. 213f.; Scaff, 2011, p. 202). Why there was nevertheless a one-sided reception of only the bureaucracy type cannot be examined in detail here. However, the intellectual significance of Parsons, whose Structure of Social Action (1937) can be regarded as essentially responsible for Weber’s early influence in the United States, probably played a significant role in this.8 It can therefore hardly be doubted that Weber’s reception in the United States in general, and especially in the sociology of organization, was predetermined and distorted in many aspects by his structural-­ functionalist use of Weber and by the translations that were partly determined by his own theoretical ambitions (cf. Cohen et al., 1975, p. 230; Tribe, 2007, p. 226) –  At this point, Weber also uses the word “Organisation” in German, whereas instead, where the English translation speaks otherwise  of organizations, he usually uses the word “Verband”. 8  Another reason is probably that America’s modern large corporations were already described in terms of state bureaucracies and structured according to them during their rise towards the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Graeber, 2015, p. 11f.). The concept of a “bureaucratic administrative staff” therefore also seemed appropriate for private capitalist organizations. 7

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for example, by translating “Betrieb” with “organization” or “Herrschaft” with “imperative control” or later with “leadership”, which eventually eliminated all the basic, historical nuances of meaning of the German word (cf. Parsons, 1947, pp.  151ff, 221f.; 1960, p.  752).9 The translation of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich is also not very instructive for a well-­ founded interpretation of Weber in terms of the sociology of organization, since it simply translates “Verband” as “organization”, although, as will be shown, “organization” is much more likely to be regarded as a special kind of “Verband” (cf. Weber, 1978, p. 48ff.).10 Despite a lack of reception lines, Weber’s description of corporate capitalism in particular, with its commercial operating technology and rational organisation of work, contains many arguments that can be very well connected to organizational sociological considerations and, at least at first glance, can be made useful for a interpretation of “organisation” based on modernization theory. While capitalism for Weber, as already mentioned, and likewise the “capitalist enterprise” and the “entrepreneur” “not only as an occasional but also as a permanent entrepreneur” (Weber, 1988a, p. 6) are not specific to the Occident or modernity, only the modern, Occidental form of capitalism has produced the “rational organization of work” to any significant degree: It is only in the Occident that rational capitalist enterprises with fixed capital, free labour and the rational specialisation and combination of work can be found, with purely commercial distribution effected on the basis of capitalist economy. Which means: the capitalist form of formally purely voluntaristic organisation of labour as the typical and ruling form through which the needs of the broad mass are met, with the expropriation of workers from the means of production, and the appropriation of enterprises to those who hold securities. (Weber, 2019, p. 283)

Crucial to the rational organization of labor and thus to modern, rational “factory capitalism” is in particular the contractual hiring of formally “free” workers, who must offer their labor power on a labor market (cf. Weber, 1988a, p.  7; 1988b,  That Parsons was well aware of the difficulties of translating economy and society is shown by the countless footnotes he added to his attempt to translate the first three chapters. And it is also undeniable what Lawrence A. Scaff remarks about this very translation: “pried loose from their linguistic matrix, some concepts lose too much of their original connotation”. Whether Parsons’ translation can therefore already be considered “as close as we can come to Weber’s last words in social theory”, however, remains more than questionable (cf. Scaff, 2011, p. 237). 10  The same is the case for Keith Tribe’s translation, which as the most up-to-date translation is nevertheless used here. 9

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p. 15; cf. also Hermes, 2004, p. 183f.; Schluchter, 2009, p. 210). Compared to the slave farms of antiquity or other organizational forms of unfree labor, the contractual purchase or rental of bare labor meant, on the one hand, immediate savings in acquisition and boarding costs, as well as a reduction in the risks posed by unexpected incapacity to work or sharp price fluctuations on the slave market. In the case of slave labor, the risk of loss of work also prohibited specialisation of work and the division of labor between the individual stages of work. On the other hand, free selection and contractual employment allowed for new, more efficient forms of disciplining or motivating workers, who could now be assumed to have a vested interest due to the competitive pressure of the labor market (cf. Weber, 1998, pp. 53f.; 1950, pp. 128f.). Whereas in earlier forms of economic association, such as domestic or tribal trade, a “strictly integrated internal economy” and an “absolute freedom of trade externally” stood side by side, “[i]nternal and external ethics” were thus separate, the modern rational organization of labor with its formally “free” contractual attitude meant “a lifting of the barrier between the internal economy and external economy, between internal and external ethics, and the entry of the commercial principle into the internal economy, with the organization of labor on this basis”(Weber, 1950, p. 312f.). In particular, the concept of organization of systems-theoretical organizational sociology, with its emphasis on the importance of formal membership for work motivation and the only partial inclusion of members, which means nothing other than that not the worker but only certain work efforts or parts of his labor power are included, seems to agree with Weber’s concept of rational work organization in many points. In this respect, the restriction of their concept of organization to modernity could also be supported socially and economically by Weber’s remarks. However, as Weber shows in his handbook article on agrarian relations in antiquity, it is precisely the aspect of partial inclusion through free wage labor that is not categorically limited to occidental modernity: Antiquity knew not only the unfree and half-free but also the free peasant, as owner or tenant or share-cropper. Likewise there existed, side by side with cottage industry and slave labour shops, production by free artisans […]. There were family workshops, one-man shops (much the most frequent), and shops run by a master with one or more slaves and free or (generally) unfree apprentices. There also existed the joint cooperative of artisans (Greek: synergoi) similar to the Russian artel, as well as the organized crew of skilled craftsmen brought together by a contractor (Greek: ergolabön) for specific purposes, nearly always composed of state workers. […] Finally, Antiquity knew the free, unskilled wage earner; this type developed gradually from people sold into temporary slavery by themselves or by others (children, debtors). Wage earners were hired for harvesting, and were used by the state in large numbers

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2  Max Weber and the Sociology of Organization for excavation work, construction and other public projects. Otherwise their employment was generally scattered and irregular. (Weber, 1998, p. 47f.)11

Moreover, “organization”, as already in Weber’s sociology of rule, is conceptually not identical with its specifically modern form of rational work organization, but is also referred by him, for example, to the medieval guilds or the “state organization for the forced imposition of public tasks” (Leiturgieorganisation) of the Greek poleis (cf. Weber, 1998, p. 47). Likewise, there had already been capitalist business associations in pre-modern times. Rather, what is decisive for modernity is that the capitalist, formally free organization of labor becomes the “typical and dominant form of meeting the needs of broad masses” (Weber, 2019, p. 283; cf. also 1950, p. 276f.). Not a categorical difference that excludes the contractual form of labor organization for pre-modernity in principle, in other words, but a gradual difference in the relative quantitative importance of such enterprises for meeting the everyday needs of a society.

 For more recent findings on contractual wage labor in the first known great empire of Assyria, see also Radner (2015, p. 333ff.). 11

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The sociology of organization, as has been shown, does not have a uniform understanding of organization. However, a concept of organization can be outlined idealtypically on the basis of various organizational sociological definitions and the history of concepts, which seems to underlie all the approaches considered more or less clearly. According to this, organizations are social systems that are based on consciously planned and implemented positive orders oriented on rational models or “myths” – although these do not, of course, guide all factual action. By conforming to the widespread rational models, organizational orders appear to be reasonable and insofar legitimate, which is why, at least within organizations, one can also count on receiving “voluntary” obedience for orders of certain content – i.e. exercise rule in Weber’s sense. The aspect of rule, for all its criticism of simple chains of command-obedience, also remains in Luhmann’s terminology as the “generalized willingness to accept decisions whose content is still indeterminate within certain limits of tolerance” (Luhmann, 2019c, p. 28; cf. also 2018b, p. 159). According to Luhmann, the tendency inherent in all decisions to demonstrate power and to solidify rule is conditioned and depersonalized, but not abolished by organization, i.e. here: recourse to other internal decisions (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 67f.). Even if the instrumentality of organizations as a means of exercising rule by determinable elite groups, which Türk and Bruch emphasize, is certainly not in Luhmann’s sense, he factually agrees with them at least that rule in the broadest sense of the word is characteristic of organizational structures. In addition to the vertical, hierarchical differentiation in relations of rule, organizations also possess an internal differentiation of functions, or a structure based on the division of labor. This is the central implication of the metaphor of the body, from which the concept of organization has sprouted, although the division of labor seems to be less at the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 P. Jakobs, Max Weber and the sociology of organization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7_3

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centre of interest of organizational sociologists today, or at any rate does not (any longer) find its way into the definitions of the concept. The systems theory school in particular also elevates membership, or the decidability of membership conditions, to the hallmark of organizations par excellence. Closely related to this is the only partial inclusion of the person in the organization (as opposed to total inclusion in a personal association or family). In many aspects, though not in all, it corresponds to the formally “free” wage labour which, according to Max Weber, is characteristic of the modern, rational organisation of work. In this context, conditional membership and partial inclusion are often seen as the central reasons for a historical restriction of organization to modernity – although, as Weber already showed, free wage labor also existed to a certain extent in antiquity and, for example, the occupation of the pontifical colleges or other religious offices in republican Rome or the hiring of civil servants in New Kingdom Egypt can be regarded as examples of partial inclusion par excellence (cf. Kehrer, 1982, p. 50; Warburton, 2000, p. 172). Finally, organizations possess a certain degree of autonomy, i.e. decisions about orders, goals or procedures are made internally or organisational decisions are derived from other own decisions of the organisation. Even if Türk and Bruch consider the symbolic closure of the organization implied therein to be an ideological fiction, relative autonomy seems to have been included in the concept early on and was elaborated into a central defining feature in the notion of the organization as a social actor, especially in the US tradition, notably by James Coleman. In terms of conceptual history, the external orientation of organizations as associations of wills oriented towards the pursuit of specific, external goals – even if only acquisition – or the external representation of specific interests is also significant. In organizational sociology, this aspect is only elevated to an essential conceptual content by the political-economic approach, according to which organisations are also “extroversively” rule-oriented, i.e. they aim at influencing third parties, but, as will be shown, it seems to be quite central to organizations in general. The participatory aspect, which Meyer and Bromley choose as a defining characteristic of “organization”, on the other hand, seems to be supported neither by the history of the term nor by the other sociological understanding of the term. It may be a characteristic of certain modern organisations, but it seems to be rather a deviation from the usual notion of the term “organization” and, at any rate, conceptually hardly permits a restriction of the concept as such to modernity or “postmodernity”. However, the orientation towards “rational” models or towards certain ideas of “rationality” in the sense of an order that is relatively free of contradictions and therefore predictable – whereby no restriction to specifically occidental or modern ideas has to be implied – can very well be regarded as typical for organisations.

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Ultimately, the question of whether organizations existed before modernity is misguided and concerns only definitional choices. If one conceptualizes organizations in terms of specifically modern conditions, such as the scientification and rational availability of the most fundamental convictions and a legitimacy of ­rational procedures based on this, the practice of an “organizational” habitus through processes of social disciplining, or a comprehensive, “free” labor market, then organizations by definition naturally exist only under these conditions and insofar – if one follows the modernization theory implied in this – only in modernity. And indeed, there is something to be said for examining modern organizations, both in terms of their internal structure and in terms of their social spread and significance, as phenomena of their own kind, as Weber did on the basis of the concept of the “rational organization of labor” or even of “legal rule with a bureaucratic administrative staff.” However, while Weber was familiar with more general terms such as “enterprise” (Betriebsverband) or “administrative staff” (Verwaltungsstab) in general – or just: “organization” – in addition to the specifically modernist terms, and was thus able to place the specifically modern forms alongside their pre-­ modern alternatives and contrast them with them, the sociology of organization does not possess such an umbrella term, but instead establishes the specifically modern form as its fundamental and most general concept, which is why “organization” appears historically isolated here: It has no continuous connection to medieval corporate forms, such as craft  guilds, monasteries, or merchant  guilds, and therefore these can contribute nothing to its understanding (cf. Kieser, 1989, p. 557ff.; Drepper, 2018, p. 21). This isolation, however, not only bears the danger of misjudging the “modern” in historical retrospect – especially when a truncated view of the European Middle Ages is negatively applied to all other times and regions – but also of overlooking the mutability of modern conditions. Can one still speak of organizations, for example, in the “start-up culture” of the so-called New Economy, where more than a “partial inclusion” of “employees” is to be achieved through the cult of genius, leisure time activities and stock options, and where neither fixed hierarchies nor a real specification of functions exist, but rather “emotional communalisation” of the type of followship of a charismatic leader (cf. Kühl, 2003a, pp. 60, 132ff.; Stuhr, 2010, pp. 111f., 120, 190f.)? Or also in other companies, both in the field of so-called “knowledge work” and in the more traditional industries, where attempts are made to achieve a commitment of individuals that goes far beyond what is agreed on in the formal employment contract by means of identity work, control of the “corporate culture” and offers of “direct” participation, such as individual target agreements or self-regulated forms of work (cf. Deutschmann, 2002, p.  137)? Other developments tending towards

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temporary work, fixed-term contracts or bogus self-employment seem to undermine the central importance of membership. For these reasons, among others, Gerald F. Davis, for example, already speaks of an end to the classic “society of organizations” characterized by industrial work and bureaucracy, at least for the United States, through the emergence of finance capitalism (cf. Davis, 2009). But do the newly emerging hedge funds and investment banks, as well as the “outsourced” supplier companies that are supposed to characterize the new “post-corporate economy”, not also use typical means of, for example, self-preservation even at the expense of purposes or the cultivation of loyalty towards internals and externals, as they have been used in a more or less comparable way in other organizations at all kinds of other times, and should therefore not only be studied with the instruments of organizational sociology, as Davis demands, but also as organizations just in a slightly different sense (cf. Davis, 2017, p. 321)?1 The contrast that Davis highlights would perhaps seem less drastic if not only the industrial and bureaucratic organizations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which also otherwise often shape our image of organizations, were taken into consideration. Similar to Davis, Göran Ahrne, Nils Brunsson and David Seidl, for example, also see the subject of organizational sociology increasingly disappearing today. As dutiful sociologists of organization, they therefore strive to save or “resurrect” it by extending the term “organization” to other social structures beyond formal organizations – for example, to families or social movements – referring to them as “partial” organization (cf. Ahrne et al., 2016, p. 95). “Organization,” however, thereby becomes a designation of a structural property of systems, so that social networks, for example, can have varying degrees of “organization” (cf. Ahrne et al., 2016, p. 97), which, as some German systems theorists correctly note, blurs the concept of organization, which usefully refers to social systems rather than their structural properties (cf. Apelt et al., 2017; cf. also Schwarting, 2020, pp. 111f.). No matter how critically one views these interpretations in detail, they certainly seem to be an expression of an inkling that “organizations” are losing their meaning in the classical understanding of organizational sociology. But it is not only such current tendencies pointing to the future that indicate the all too rigid boundaries of the usual concept of organization. On the other hand, older entities that still exist today and are usually regarded as organizations also drop out of it. In particular, for example, “compulsory organizations”, i.e. organizations “which prohibit their members from leaving or at least make it considerably  The legal scholar Simon Deakin, for example, examines recent network-like economic organizations under the sign of a possible “return of the craft guilds” (cf. Deakin, 2006). 1

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more difficult for them to do so” and rely on the threat of physical violence to enforce their membership expectations (Kühl, 2012, p. 345f.). Stefan Kühl includes, for example, armies and militias, border troops, dyke cooperatives or criminal organizations, but also companies that use forced laborers. Here it is hardly possible to speak of formally “free” membership, and in some cases – for example in the case of barracked soldiers or criminal organizations – not even of merely partial inclusion. Also churches, which are usually understood – not quite correctly – as organizations, and especially organizations in church sponsorship deviate in essential points from the narrow understanding of organization. For example, the formal orders of the charitable or administrative organizations of the Roman Catholic Church, which are essentially contained in canon law, can hardly be said to be the rational construction and institution of positive statutes, but rather the interpretation of traditional norms (cf. Petzke & Tyrell, 2012, pp. 289f.).2 In the narrow, organizational sociological sense, all these cases are not organizations. The concept of organization, as it has developed in the course of the last centuries and still more or less clearly underlies the various determinations of organizational sociology today, seems to have a specific, delimitable object in mind, but any sharper delimitation excludes social entities that are usually also understood and analyzed as organizations. This problem, according to my thesis, stems primarily from the historical blinkers that the sociology of organization has put on itself by occasionally squinting, negatively delimiting itself, into the European Middle Ages, but beyond that, conceptually, hardly ever leaving modernity. If one wants to develop a concept of organization that is both general enough to encompass only today’s organizations and, if possible, also newly developing organizations, but at the same time specific enough to distinguish organizations from other social forms such as families, neighborhoods, or cliques – which is not to say that these cannot also overlap – then it is worthwhile to let one’s gaze wander further back and geographically over greater distances. For at many historical times and in almost all “advanced civilizations” there were social systems that can best be understood as organizations and that share essential structural features with the modern organizations of organizational sociology. What is specific about “modern” organizations, on the other hand, only really becomes apparent in comparison with their “pre-­ modern” counterparts. The work of Max Weber lends itself to such a perspective above all because here, as nowhere else, historical and geographical vastness of knowledge are combined with conceptual acuity and a will to generalize. With the help of some of Weber’s concepts and considerations, it is therefore possible to find  Hence also the numerous personnel conflicts about divorced or not baptized people, which from a modernization-theoretical understanding of organization may seem archaic. 2

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starting points with which the ideal-typical definition of the organizational sociological concept of organization developed above can be both historically generalized and conceptually sharpened.

3.1 Internal Structure of Organisations Even if Max Weber, as has been shown, cannot be understood as a sociologist of organization in the narrower sense, he certainly examined entities that would be called organizations today (such as closed large-scale industry) and developed categories that can be interpreted in terms of a historically sharpened concept of organization. If by “organization” Weber means the “existence of the administrative staff and the continuing action it takes to assure the execution and enforcement of orders” (Weber, 2019, p. 402, see above.), the term “organization” seems to serve primarily to designate the structure of a system of action – in Weber’s terminology: a closed social relationship – or the process of action execution. “Organization” in the sense of the system itself, on the other hand, can thus only mean a closed relationship that possesses an order and a “behaviour of particular persons”, in this case: of an administrative staff, “charged specifically with its implementation”, i.e.: a certain kind of Verband (Weber, 2019, p. 129). While the existence of a Verband requires at least the presence of a director (Leiter) who orients his actions not only to the order but to its enforcement, i.e. an administrative staff does not necessarily have to be added, one should only speak of an organization if, in addition, there is also an administrative staff that orients its actions to the observance of the order.3 If one were to look to Weber for a minimal definition of organization, one could insofar commit oneself to the following: an organization should be called a Verband with an administrative staff. Beyond this, however, numerous other structural descriptions can be found in Weber’s work that can also be regarded as typical for organizations, in discussion with the concept-historical and organisational-­ sociological definition of the term. In addition to an administrative staff, an organization also possesses an order. That much can be directly deduced from the “minimal definition”, because the administrative staff is characterized precisely by the orientation of its actions to the implementation of an order. According to Weber, one can always speak of an order when action is factually “oriented by an actor’s conception of the existence of a legitimate order” (Weber, 2019, p. 108). It thus exists – quite comparable to the  This is also why the term „Verband“ should not be just translated, as Keith Tribe does, with „organisation“. 3

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theoretical style of neo-institutionalism – essentially as an imaginative category or as a content of meaning, but only appears empirically through the influence it exerts as such on human behaviour. In particular, the existence of an “administrative order” (Verwaltungsordnung) that regulates the “organisational action” (Verbandshandeln) of the administrative staff and the other participants is crucial for an o­ rganization (cf. Weber, 2019, pp. 129, 132). It contains the rules that guide the behavior of the participants in the direction of those ends “whose attainment prescribed, planfully oriented action on the part of both administrative staff and organization members strives to secure” (Weber, 2019, p. 133). The orders of an organization do not necessarily have to be legally legitimized, i.e. they do not have to be “statutable” in principle through formally correct procedures (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 115f.). At first glance, this seems to contradict the central meaning of the rational and immediately practical availability of social orders, especially in conceptual history, but it is already necessary, for example, if we are to speak of certain ecclesiastical associations as organizations. More decisive than a rational statuability (Satzbarkeit) is rather that the organizational orders are formulated (often also in writing) and refer reflexively to certain goals. According to Weber, the former applies in principle to orders in general, which can be identified, among other things, by the fact that “action is (on average and approximately) oriented to definable ‘principles’” and this orientation is regarded as socially binding (Weber, 2019, p. 109, emphasis mine, PJ.). On an anthropological level, “orders” can in this respect already be considered those “one-sided, stylized, monitored structures” which, according to Arnold Gehlen, man lifts out of his “natural substratum” by means of representational behaviour and inner formulation and which thereby acquire a normative bindingness, i.e.: Institutions (cf. Gehlen, 1986, p. 206). According to Gehlen, the formation of order or institutions in this sense must already be assumed for the Neolithic and implies both a factual change in behaviour and experience and, as a rule, the fulfilment of certain practical “functions” – regardless of whether these are intended or not (cf. Gehlen, 1986, p. 206f.). But it is only a “reflexive functionality” that goes beyond such basic “institutional mutualizations” that is to be understood here as characteristic of organizational orders: Organizations are formed in the repeated and unifying formulation of already existing but diffuse guiding ideas into fixed organizational goals (cf. Albrecht, 2020a, p. 164). This provision also encompasses ecclesiastical organizations whose associational statutes may not themselves be purely positive, but nevertheless contain positive prescriptions for goal-directed action by their members and are reflected upon and in effect reformed in councils or congregations in the form of new

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interpretations of traditional norms.4 Moreover, the notion of “reflexive functionality” also contains the idea of a conscious re-creation of social orders, which need not at all be identical with a rational, legitimate formulation of them by formally correct procedure. It does, however, refer to the close relationship which organizations have always had in their formation to partly comprehensive social reform efforts of various kinds. Therefore, especially for the foundation of an organization, a reflexive re-creation and specification of goals can certainly be assumed, whether this remains present as such in the consciousness of the organization’s participants or not (cf. also Geser, 1982, p. 113f.). For Verbände with rationally set orders, Weber distinguishes between associations (Vereine), whose statued orders “are valid only for those who are members by virtue of joining on a personal basis”, and institutions (Anstalten), whose statued orders “can, within a given domain, be (relatively) successfully imposed on all whose action has specified particular characteristics” (Weber, 2019, p. 133). Even if organizations in the sense meant here do not need to possess rationally set orders, this distinction seems quite relevant for the concept of organization. After all, it points to the central role of membership, at least for modern organizational sociology. According to their ideas of a “free”, contractual membership, organizations seem to be more in the direction of the association, even if a “partial inclusion” can also be present in institutions – for example, if a person is simultaneously a member of a state and a church or a member of different states. Also, the above-­ mentioned “compulsory organisations” fall rather under the concept of an institution with its “imposed orders”, which is why the type of association cannot be regarded as congruent with that of an organisation – this also corresponds to the everyday understanding of the two concepts.5 Without wanting to overdo the subtleties of the choice of words, it can also be noted that Weber does not speak of a “free” entry or a “voluntary” membership in the case of the “association”, but of an  On the productivity of elaborate rituals and theologies that not only preserve what has been handed down, but also relate it to what is new, cf. Kehrer (1982, p. 55). 5  The connection between Weber’s concept of association and the modern sociological concept of organization can be illustrated, among other things, by the fact that Weber, in a discussion speech at the first Sociologists’ Conference in 1910, considered it one of the most urgent tasks of sociology to research the modern “association system” (cf. Weber, 1988b, p. 442ff.). The epistemological interests and impulses that Weber had in mind at the time (such as the effect of association membership on personality or the ways in which an association leader could assure himself of the loyalty of members) were later taken up primarily by the newly emerging sociology of organization and analyzed with the help of the more general concept of organization. The “sociology of associations”, on the other hand, remained a desideratum for a long time (cf. Müller-Jentsch, 2008). 4

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entry on “a personal basis”. If one understands by this not merely the dependence of entry on the decision of the person entering, but any form of entry insofar as it is dependent only on certain actions related to the particular person entering, either of the person entering himself or of the previous members of the association, this is a thoroughly useful criterion for organizations. Families in which one is a member by birth fall outside this definition, insofar as the actions that lead to ­membership do not relate to the person entering, which as a rule does not yet exist at that time. Similarly, rites of passage that one goes through as a matter of course on the basis of belonging to a family or a local group do not signify entry into an organization, because membership does not depend on the ritual acts themselves, but on the pre-existing membership, and is only comprehended and thereby affirmed by those acts. However, one can very well describe as “on a personal basis” in the sense meant here, for example, the entry into the “military societies” of the Cheyenne and other Peoples of the Plains, into one of which every male tribal member normally enters, but into which certain ones depend on offers on the part of the associates and on ritual “sales negotiations”, (cf. Wilderotter, 1990, p. 238f.) or also that into the Indian professional priesthood, which is recruited as a rule from the Brahmin caste, but into which not every Brahmin enters qua birth (cf. Michaels, 1998, p. 210). However, this does not answer whether these two examples are organizations, and in fact, especially as far as the Indian priesthood is concerned, it is highly questionable (cf. Kehrer, 1982, p. 35). A “entry on personal basis” in the sense meant here seems at any rate to be possible not only for organizations, but also for other forms of associations and status roles. However, the fact that entries into organizations are also dependent on ritual acts in the broadest sense can certainly be regarded as typical and insofar as a conceptual feature – be it a signing of a contract followed by a handshake, greeting phrases and a drink, the ceremonial admission into a men’s league or the sentencing of a criminal to “compulsory membership” in a prison.6 What is essential is that the mere attribution of

 The fact that organizational entrances are circumscribed by generalized rules and norms is conceptually contained in the ritual act; the fact that, in addition, it is usually a matter of legally defined status attributions can also be regarded as typical, but, if one does not want to overstretch the concept of law, it does not apply historically to all organizations. 6

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characteristics is not sufficient to determine membership in a specific organization.7 In many respects, this corresponds to Luhmann’s concept of decision, which is, after all, characterized precisely by the “paradox” that “undecidable things” must be decided, i.e. that, given equally attainable alternatives, the decision itself first tips the scales in favor of one side or the other (cf. Luhmann, 2006, p. 132). In this sense, one can certainly agree with Luhmann that membership in organizations is based on decision. However, on whose decision  – whether that of the entrant alone, that of the members of the organization, that of third parties, or a combination of these – is highly variable historically and geographically.8 A key feature of organizations that organizational sociology has repeatedly highlighted is their “autonomy” or their capacity to act or communicate as a kind of corporate actor. The “autonomy” as opposed to the “heteronomy” of social associations is distinguished by Weber from the “auto” or “heterocephaly” of the same. While autonomous associations can give themselves their orders, autocephalous associations appoint their executive and corporate staff offices according to their own directives; in the case of heteronomous or heterocephalous associations, both are respectively provided by outsiders (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 130).9 Organizations can also be described as “autonomous” in this sense, at least from a systems theory perspective: insofar as they reproduce themselves by recourse to their own internal decisions. Empirically, of course, there are numerous organizations that are also structured “heteronomously”, at least in part – for example, almost all contemporary organizations through legal guidelines or also through powers of command, which in large corporations, for example, are shifted to other subunits that themselves often form organizations. Nevertheless, a minimum degree of “autonomy”, i.e. the at least partial possibility of the constitution of internal behavioural specifications – even if only with regard to manners or peripheral goals – seems to be  Consequently, in a strict sense, “institutions” in Weber’s understanding – i.e. essentially: states and churches – are not themselves organizations: hence, the distinction between institutional and organizational affiliation can also be used to distinguish between citizens of the state and civil servants, or between simple “passive” church members and church officials – although these distinctions are in danger of becoming blurred in light of an increasing noncommitment of nationality and religious affiliation, which today are mostly seen as the subject of conscious, personal decision (cf. on this also Luhmann, 2019a, p. 20ff.). 8  The motivating power of self-commitment that Luhmann attributes to decidable membership only exists, of course, when membership is at least also based on the decision of the person joining and there is free selection of members (cf. Luhmann, 1999, p. 37). 9  Keith Tribe mistranslates „autocephaly“ as „that the executive and the corporate staff act according to the directives of their own organisation“. Decisive for Weber is that they are appointed according to own directives. 7

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quite essential when speaking of a definable Verband as an organisation. Whether a Verband is autocephalous or heterocephalous, on the other hand, should here represent a differentiation within the concept of organization. If one speaks of organizations as “social” or “corporate actors” beyond autonomy understood in this way (cf. for example Coleman, 1982, p. 7ff.; Kieser, 1989, p. 540; Brunsson & Sahlin-Anderson, 2000, p. 731),10 one becomes conceptually imprecise from the point of view of a theory of action based on Weber. Johannes Weiß, for example, points out with regard to organizational sociology that its “corporate actors”, “i.e. the organizations of law, religion, science, etc.”, cannot be ­attributed “action in a strict and empirically comprehensible sense […], but only to those concrete (natural) persons who stand and act for them” (Weiß, 1998, p. 56). Therefore, representation in the sense of attributing the actions of certain members of the association (the representatives) to the other members of the association can be seen as an essential characteristic of organizations in the (action-theoretical) sense meant here (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 437). According to Weber, it is a possible consequence of the traditional or statutory order of a social relationship and includes various, permanent or temporary, traditional or statutory forms of appropriation of the power of representation (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 127). Organizations, however, not only rely on representative action in general, but moreover empirically often formalize the representative function by assigning it to a formal body or committee rather than to an individual as such (cf. Sofsky & Paris, 1991, p. 128). However, this is not intended as a conceptual feature here, because then, for example, owner-managed companies, in which representation also falls to the person of the founder as such, would fall outside the definition, although they may be very typical organisations. However, the fact that representation to the outside world exists in some form is essential because of the assumed capacity of organisations to act. The representative positions are usually linked to specific power opportunities and already refer to the rule-like structure of organisations, which is also determining in other respects. “Thanks to the existence of an administrative staff, an organisation is always, to some extent, a ruling organisation.” This is especially true of such organizations, whose members are accordingly “subordinated, by virtue of a valid order, to

 Hans Geser even goes so far as to claim that organizations, as secondary actors, are more in line with the current actor models than individual “primary” actors in terms of, for example, responsibility, differentiation of attention and action, or end-means trade-offs (cf. Geser, 1990, p. 415). 10

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r­ elationships of rule” (Weber, 2019, p. 135).11 This rule-like character of organizations has been emphasized in organizational sociology by Türk and Bruch in particular; however, as has been shown, it is also present in Luhmann. The crucial point is that the asymmetries are not based solely on extra-organizational factors, but are anchored in the prevailing organizational order and exist because of its validity, i.e. an explicit and at least rudimentarily formalized hierarchy exists.12 Modern sociologists of organisation also seem to be in broad agreement on this point.13 In such an order of rule, moreover, at least the approach of a division and coordination of human work (Leistungen) is implied: namely, between commanding and obeying, between dispositional human work and human work, which is oriented to the dispositions of others (Arbeit) (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 210f.). This, in the form of a fixed allocation of both responsibilities, determines the differentiation of administrative staff and “ordinary” participants, but also, as a rule, the internal structure of the administrative staff. This “vertical” division of power, insofar as it involves the allocation of fixed responsibilities, is here supposed to be a minimum requirement for speaking of organizations. This is required by the metaphor of the body, which thus finds reference points at least in the form of the distinction between “head” and “body”. Within the administrative staff, however, there are often  Cf. also the formulation in Breuer (1998, p. 17): “All organizations in which the members of the association are divided into commanders and obeyers are ruling-organisations (Herrschaftsverbände), which is as true of armies and hospitals as it is of schools and factories.” 12  This does not mean, of course, that the concrete power relations between organizational members cannot also be based on factors external to the organization, but only that certain orders of rule are made explicit in the organizational order and are considered valid on the basis of these. The fact that concrete relations, which are also based on external sources of power, can in fact stand in opposition to the formal order of rule has been pointed out by Horst Bosetzky, among others (cf. 2019, p. 3). 13  For instance, with regard to administrations, Luhmann also talks about “derived non-hierarchical authority”, which is characterized by the programming of certain abstract information types as motivating “triggers” of certain performances and thus relieves from direct forms of command in hierarchical relations, but nevertheless admits that the “program structure” of an organization in the form of programming and program-executing positions typically represents a hierarchical formal structure of the organization (cf. Luhmann, 1999, p. 97f., 2018a, p. 306). Moreover, programs based on derived authority also appear as “collected blanket orders” from the superior (cf. Luhmann, 2018a, p. 320). Even in the case of derived authority and in the (empirically probably very unlikely) extreme case of a complete absence of direct command-obedience relationships between individual members, the members qua organizational order thus remained formally subject to relationships of rule even in Luhmann’s view. 11

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and already early on also “horizontal” divisions of fixed responsibilities – for example, into extroversely oriented representative and introversely oriented control offices – which can be regarded as typical for organizations. In reference to a “sociation with a continuous and purposively acting administrative staff”, Weber speaks of an enterprise (Betriebsverband) (Weber, 2019, p. 133, emphasis mine, PJ). The aspect of continuity is already contained in his own definition of “organization” and is also an essential feature of organizations in other respects. It also allows them to be distinguished conceptually, for example, from “undertakings”, which can also be continuous themselves, i.e. organizations, but which often do not exhibit continuity as “individual undertakings”, for example as trading expeditions or raids (cf. Weber, 1988a, p.  6; Weber, 1988b, p.  59f.). Organizations are permanent entities, not sporadic gatherings or “project-like” individual cooperations, even if these sometimes have strong organizational features and, especially if they extend over a longer period of time, merge fluidly into organizations.14 The purposeful action of the administrative staff must not be confused with an outwardly directed purposefulness and the implied “efficiency” of the organizational structure as a whole, but rather refers to the determinants of the individual behavior of the member of the administrative staff, who “orients their action to the purpose, means, and associated consequences of an act, and so rationally weighs the relation of means to ends, that of the ends to the associated consequences, and that of the various possible ends to each other” (Weber, 2019, p. 102f.). A certain neutrality towards value-rational or emotional convictions and a certain degree of opportunism in the application of means implied therein seem to be quite typical not only for modern organizations, which in this respect can generally be regarded not only as Verbände but also as enterprises (Betriebsverbände). At the same time, an orientation to external “purposes” or opportunities can be assumed to a certain extent – certainly also in Weber’s sense – not for organizations as a whole, but for certain actions of the members of the administrative staff that affect the organization. For him, it refers in particular to the combative contexts in which most state bureaucracies, but also private-sector association formations, originate and make sense, and which will be examined in more detail below. In  Whether the “temporary organizational forms” that have increasingly been the focus of organizational sociology in recent years are organizations in the sense meant here depends in this respect on the individual case and, as everywhere, on the research question (cf. Bakker, 2010, p. 468f.; Brès et al., 2018, p. 372f.). Historically, project-based, temporarily limited cooperation with typical structural features of today’s organizations may have been common much earlier than continuous organizations in the sense meant here – be it in the form of war campaigns, be it in the form of frond services for state buildings or Leiturgies. 14

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assuming such an external purpose orientation, the intention is neither to rehash an outdated “purpose model” of the organization, nor to imply a comprehensive describability of the social reality of organizations solely through concepts of purpose (cf. Luhmann, 2018b, p. 157ff.). The externally oriented reference to purpose is only one typical element of organizations among many and refers only to certain actions. One specific aspect of this external orientation of organizations is economic activity. Not all organizations are economic organizations (Wirtschaftsverbände) in Weber’s sense, but all organizations must act in an economically oriented way to some degree. According to Weber, economically oriented means any action insofar “as its intended meaning is oriented to meeting (Fürsorge) a desire for utilities” (Weber, 2019, p. 143), where “utilities” (Nutzleistungen) are understood to mean “those concrete (real or putative) Chancen of present or future possible uses” that the economic agents regard as means for the ends they pursue, which includes as “material intermediaries” both “goods” and human “services” in the narrower sense (Weber, 2019, p. 150). For Weber, an economic organization is an autocephalous organization (Verband) whose order provides for a primarily economically oriented “peaceful exercise of power of disposition” (Weber, 2019, pp. 143, 157). An organization (Verband) whose administrative staff is not primarily economically oriented, i.e. which is not itself an economic organization, can under certain circumstances nevertheless be regarded as an “organization engaged in economic activity (wirtschaftender Verband)” “if the orientation of the group’s primarily noneconomic activity also includes such economic activity” (Weber, 2019, p. 157). As a rule, this also applies to organizations which, unlike commercial enterprises or consumer cooperatives, are not themselves economic organizations, such as schools, universities, hospitals and many others. The minimum degree of economically oriented behaviour that can be assumed in every organization in the sense meant here is some form of housekeeping, because on the one hand, the organization’s action generally requires certain useful services for its implementation (“financing”), and on the other hand, the management and the administrative staff are usually, and sometimes also the other members, remunerated in some form, for which both times some form of a more or less constant “income” of the association and an administration of the same is a prerequisite (cf. Weber, 2019, pp. 319, 328). “Householding” implies for Weber, at least in the rational case, the drawing up of a budget that offsets the needs of a budgetary period against the expected income, resorting to monetary or in-kind accounting for this purpose (cf. Weber, 2019, pp. 173f.). It seems to be present in organizations in general, without implying in it a limitation to modern forms of managerial cost-benefit accounting or double-entry bookkeeping. Early forms of household accounting and bookkeeping with the aid

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of counting stones can already be traced for the early advanced civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. The development of writing, which is closely related to the development of bookkeeping and already influenced early forms of organization in many ways (cf. Goody, 1996, p. 49f.; Ezzamel & Hoskint, 2002, p. 341ff.), is decisive here. As will also become clear at various points in what follows, writing has been historically highly significant both for the administration of organizations of various kinds and for the emergence of specialized organizations of the transmission of literality. If one wants to locate the emergence of organizations historically, the emergence of writing seems to have been a much more incisive demarcation line than the development of formally “free” rentability of the labor power of “broad masses.” Another essential aspect that the sociology of organization attributes to the organization in general, but even more clearly Max Weber to the specifically modern organization – i.e. the modern bureaucratic administrative staff and the business-­ capitalist, rational organization of work – is the detachment of the individual from his or her full inclusion in a family or other household through the separation of the means of operation from the person and the separation, above all also in terms of location, of place of residence and place of operation (cf. Weber, 1988a, p. 8; 1950, p. 162; 2019, p. 347; cf. also Luhmann, 2006, p. 381f.; Schwarting, 2020, p. 119). Even if, in particular, the private-sector combination of the (proprietary) separation of the worker from the means of production, on the one hand, with “the creation of machine production within the factory, that is, with a local accumulation of labour within one and the same room, bondage to the machine and common labour discipline within the machine room or mine”, on the other hand to the given extent, is considered by Weber to be characteristic of modernity (Weber, 1988b, p. 501), he already knows “workshop work”, i.e. separation of home and workplace (ergasterion), alongside “home work” of various kinds and alongside “itinerant work” in the consumer’s home or in the attachment trade (Anbringungsgewerbe) for much earlier times (cf. Weber, 1998, p. 85; 1950, p. 119f.).15 Thus, no argument for a principled limitation of “organizations” to modernity could yet be derived from the separation of home and workplace. If, on the other hand, one raises it to the status of a conceptual feature of organizations in general, one at the same time also excludes from the concept numerous modern and pre-modern sociations that commonly count as organizations: for example, many traditional factories that also  It can already be traced in Mesopotamia, for example among weavers from the area around Ur for the third millennium BC, who were employed full time in immobile weaving mills, but who were able to go home to their families when their work was done (cf. Van De Mieroop, 1997, p. 186). 15

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contained housing for workers16 and often also for the factory owner and his family on or immediately adjacent to their factory premises;17 or police or military barracks or, at least for the majority of their members: Clinics, prisons, or other “total institutions” in the Goffmanian sense; also convents, which can be seen not only as “proto-organizations” but certainly as organizations in the full sense (cf. Kieser, 1987, p. 108ff.). More decisive here, at least in Weber’s description, seems to be the “local accumulation of labour within one and the same room” (see above), for it is precisely on this that the uniform factory discipline is based, which “gives its specific note to the present-day type of ‘separation’ of the worker from the means of labour” (Weber, 1988b, p. 501). This could be transferred without much effort to organizations beyond modern large-scale industry, which receive specific motivational and disciplinary opportunities via spatial “accumulation” of members (cf. Treiber & Steinert, 1980, pp. 23ff., 57). Much more important than the fact that the place of production is not at the same time a place of residence for all or some of the participants is therefore that there is a place at all where all members regularly assemble and interact.18 In this sense, for example, workshops separated from the place of residence, as well as production sites with workers’ barracks or at the producer’s house can house organizations, but not, for example, the individual houses in home production, if the workers work for the same capitalist or other client, but spatially separate from each other, as is typically the case with Mesopotamian potters or in the medieval and early modern publishing system (cf. Wehler, 1987, p. 94ff.; Steinkeller, 1996, p. 249; Heusinger, 2009, p. 68ff.). It becomes conceptually difficult when, as is increasingly the case today, employment relationships exist with permanent “home office” or “teleworking”. As a rule, there is an organisation even then, insofar as not all employees work individually from home; it is only questionable to what extent those who are not regularly assembled can be sociologically assessed as full members. In the sociology of work, “telework” is studied as a form of spatial “dissolution of boundaries” of work, which, in connection with other forms of “flexibilisation”, leads today, from the point of view of the individual, to a softening of the

 Hubert Treiber and Heinz Steinert speak here of “barracked” housing within the workers’ quarter immediately adjacent to the factory site (1980, p. 50). 17  So typical for the European nineteenth century (cf. for example Joyce, 1980, p. 92f.; Berghoff, 1997, p. 180; Nielsen, 2000, p. 63f.); but similar still today for example with seasonal workers. 18  The decisive factor here should not be that all members actually interact with all other members on a regular basis, but only that they are all together in a common place and in some way working or at least supposed to work towards common goals. 16

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boundary between “life” and “work” and insofar also to a softening of the clear boundary of the respective organization of work (cf. Voß, 1998, p. 479f.). In such modern forms of “home work”, therefore, a tendency towards the dissolution of organizations can certainly be seen, although countless comparable cases of work relations can also be found here historically: “home office” is not a genuinely late-­ modern phenomenon. Sociologically, the reference to a spatiality of organizations is relevant insofar as the actors involved associate the place with the organization as a sensual and social unit and feel themselves – also due to their regular physical presence – as belonging to it; spatial locatability is therefore crucial, especially for the aspect of the “identity” of organizations.19 In addition, however, the “spatial accumulation” also serves above all the (hierarchical or collegial) control and disciplining of the members. The spatiality of organizations today also occurs explicitly at the legal level, where every legal entity must have a registered office, through which its legal capacity is determined at the same time, for example in the case of internationally active private companies.20 Organizations thus already need an address in purely legal terms and, in addition, a fixed “effective” place of assembly and operation. In contrast to this legal definition, however, the sociological concept of organization does not encompass all legal persons as a whole, but always only those “organs” whose members regularly meet at a common place, thereby perceive themselves as a social unit and can be placed under uniform control and discipline. In this respect, a large corporation with different, spatially separated production or administrative sites is not itself an organisation in sociological terms, but very possibly the individual units assembled at the sites, and in particular the head office and senior management, which regularly meet at the administrative headquarters – only they can be meant in a sociological sense when one speaks of a large corporation as an organization. Even the so-called “meta-organizations”, among which Ahrne and Brunsson (cf. 2008, p. 11f.) include formally organised, “voluntary” associations whose “members” are themselves organizations, can therefore really only be regarded as organizations in a legal sense and not in the sociological sense meant here  – if only for the simple reason mentioned by the authors themselves: “We

 Even if Luhmann (1999, p. 35) correctly notes that “frequent personal presence” decreases in formally organized social systems in comparison to “elementary” groups, it remains questionable to what extent “informal expectations” can develop without remnants of such “elementary-bonding” moments, without which, according to Luhmann, a formal organization is also not capable of survival (cf. Luhmann, 1999, p. 27). 20  This has typically been the case in German law since the beginning of the twentieth century (cf. Ebenroth & Bippus, 1988, p. 677f.). 19

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cannot meet with an organisation, but we can meet with human beings” (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008, p. 58). However, the “headquarters” and administrative offices of, for example, the EU in Brussels or the WTO in Geneva, which in turn employ and spatially “cluster” human individuals, are very much organizations in the sense meant here. The extent to which such individual units or “organs” are themselves organizations depends, of course, on other characteristics in addition to the common reference to location, in particular on whether or not they have their own administrative staff. The transitions here, as everywhere, are very fluid, especially with regard to the question of who actually belongs to the organization and who does not. It is questionable, for example, whether annual meetings at a fixed ­location can already be regarded as belonging to an organization in the sociological sense. Even in the case of large factory sites, where spatial separation occurs within the same “address”, it always depends on the viewpoint of the observer, in addition to other characteristics, whether one can speak of a comprehensive organization or several individual organizations. Perhaps this spatial aspect seems too self-evident to most sociologists of organization to be specifically listed in a definition of organization. Or spatiality, as is often the case (not only) in general systems theory, is seen as not (anymore) a relevant factor of the social. In any case, the locatability and spatiality of organizations have been widely ignored by organizational sociology, although they contain essential implications that distinguish organizations from many other social forms, such as networks or movements. Here, as elsewhere, a clearer distinction should be made between attributions under social law and social causal relationships. Both are in part closely conditioned to each other, but never in the form of unambiguous determination, but at most as independently variable, “structurally coupled” variables. The legal definition of an “organization” need not necessarily correspond to the sociological unit of investigation “organization”, at least in individual cases. Whether – beyond spatiality – there is a proprietary separation of means of operation and person is also a primarily legal question which, although it has an immense influence on the social reality of organizations, would, as a conceptual feature, restrict the concept of organization too much. Whether such a separation exists, or more generally: in what form the resources are appropriated to the members in detail, could be considered much more fruitfully as a variable within organizations; for it is only in this way that the range of variation that is possible here actually becomes sensible. In summary, organizations in the Weberian sense meant here – which already includes the existence of a continuously purposeful acting administrative staff – are called Betriebsverbände that have a consciously created, reflexive order, link membership to certain “ritual” actions related to the person of the member (“entry on a personal basis”), can, within certain limits, decide for themselves on certain rules

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of their own (“autonomy”), grant one or more representatives certain powers of representation vis-à-vis the remaining members, have a formalised hierarchy divided at least into two and, in this respect, at least a rudimentary form of division of labor, know at least primitive forms of housekeeping and bookkeeping, and have a fixed seat where the members regularly assemble. This definition is, of course, to be understood ideal-typically. At all times, and even today, there are sociations which would be called organizations, although they do not exactly correspond to all the characteristics mentioned. A really “pure” organization in the sense of the type, where e.g. really all members meet regularly at one place or the members of the administrative staff really act continuously and exclusively purposefully, is (even today) the exception. Nevertheless, the type seems to be useful in order to be able to distinguish organizations from other social entities at all times – without wanting to exclude the numerous existing transitions from the consideration. Smaller communities, such as cliques of friends or neighbourhoods, for example, are not organizations because they know neither representation nor administrative staff nor housekeeping nor a fixed seat. If they begin to build up representative bodies – for example, a neighbourhood assembly – or establish a regular meeting place, this already means – not only conceptually, but also in terms of practical consequences and capacities – a step in the direction of organization. Families, as well as charismatic or social movements, usually have one or more representatives and, at least in the case of the family, usually also some form of housekeeping and a fixed spatial location, but usually neither administrative staff nor formal hierarchy.

3.2 External Relations of Organisations State bureaucracies, for Weber, as noted above, are in the context of a ruler’s contest with “the holders or usurpers of estates appropriated master rights,” where organization-­building seems to be the ruler’s means of victory: The more he succeeds in putting himself in possession of his own staff of officials attached to his interest alone, and – related to this – of his own administrative means kept firmly in his own hands […], the more this contest is decided in his favour and against the gradually expropriated corporative privilege-holders. (Weber, 1988a, p. 271)

After all, in universal historical terms, this contest has “[i]n modern times, […] everywhere resulted in the lord’s victory, and this meant the victory of bureaucratic administration” (Weber, 2019, p. 396), so that today it is only possible to resist the

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power of the bureaucratic administration by creating a “counterorganisation” that is subject to the same bureaucratization constraints (cf. Weber, 2019, p.  350f.). Contest (Kampf) – quite in Weber’s narrower sense of a “contested social relationship” in which “an actor is oriented to the imposition of their own will on an unwilling partner or partners” (Weber, 2019, p. 117) – can be seen as the “significant environment”, so to speak, of at least state-bureaucratic organizations. Their main external points of connection, structuring purposes and fields of observation derive from situations of contest. In a very similar way, modern organizational sociology also considers formally combative situations also beyond state bureaucracies as essential points of reference for organizations. They are found, for example, in ­neo-­institutionalism under the concept of “organizational fields”, within which organizations compel each other to adopt, at least ceremonially, certain “organizational models” (cf. Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 348ff.; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, pp. 153f.) or in Luhmann, who describes organizations in society “as an agonal mass, as it were”, “which in turn puts all organizations under pressure to engage, because they can, in external communication” (Luhmann, 2006, p. 390). For the political economy of organization, this much should have become clear from the above, the instrumental use of the “organizational form” to assert ones own interests of rule, i.e. also: contest, is altogether in the foreground. But such hints, as long as the contest is not pre-decided as class struggle, usually remain without further theoretical consequence in the sociology of organization. For instance, Stefan Arora-Jonsson, Nils Brunsson and Raimund Hasse have also recently pointed out the under-theorization of combative situations in organizational theory (cf. Arora-­ Jonsson et al., 2020, p. 2f.). However, they limit their consideration to “competition” for the favour of third parties and evaluate this as a social construct in which only certain organizations participate and only under very specific time circumstances (cf. Arora-Jonsson et al., 2020, p. 8ff.). However, as far as their external relations are concerned, according to the thesis put forward here and borrowed from Weber, contest generally seems to be an essential structural feature of numerous, very different organizations at many times – and not only in the sense of a socially constructed competition, but in the sense of the assumption of a f­ undamental

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agonism of human socialization, on the basis of which numerous social phenomena first become transparent.21 In the economic theory of organization, contest is conceived that way as a matter of course and is systematised accordingly – admittedly also here in restriction to competition or market-shaped contests, in which above all economic organizations are entangled as the primary field of investigation. Especially instructive here are considerations of the so-called institutional economics and in particular the “transaction cost approach”22, which with certain restrictions can also be made fruitful for an organizational sociological view. The basic unit of analysis here is a “transaction”, an individual act of exchange. This can essentially take two forms: either “market-like” via a price mechanism between two independent actors or “hierarchical” by grouping the participants in a “firm” (cf. Coase, 1937, p. 389; Williamson, 1975, p. 8).23 This distinction can already be found in the economic sociology of Max Weber, who distinguishes two possibilities for the acquisition of power of disposal over useful services from third parties: “(a) through the formation of an organisation (Verband) to whose order the procurement or use of utilities should be oriented; (b) through exchange” (Weber, 2019, p. 154). The formation of an organization can, under certain circumstances, bring economic advantages over the price mechanism of the market in the sense of saving “transaction costs”, which arise, for example, from the uncertainty about the value of a useful service or from the chronic necessity of short-term contract negotiations (cf. Coase, 1937, p. 390f.; Williamson, 1975, p. 25). In economics, this is also seen as a causal argument for the formation of organizations: organizations thus arise wherever, due to the nature of the transactions required, hierarchical regulation is more cost-effective than market processes, i.e. where, instead of short-term agreements, long-term contracts with only a vague definition of the limits of the useful service offered are relatively  Such notions of agonal sociality can be traced back to Greek philosophy and culture. For modern European history, they became relevant in particular through the work of Thomas Hobbes, and were later taken up by Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, from where they also had a profound effect on the work of Max Weber. Other sociologists, such as Georg Simel, Erving Goffman and Norbert Elias, also see contest as a fundamental dimension of sociation. Today, such „agonistic“assumptions can be found especially in political science, very consistently elaborated, for example, by Chantal Mouffe (2014, p. 21ff.). 22  Preisendörfer (2016, p. 39ff.) provides a good overview of the transaction cost approach with a focus on organizational sociology. 23  “Organization” as a structural term is used, for example, by Oliver Williamson as an umbrella term for both market-shaped and hierarchical transactions (cf. Williamson, 1975, p. xi). In the sense understood here of a closed social relationship or a Verband (system concept), however, only hierarchical transactions are to be evaluated as “organizations”. 21

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advantageous, or where a coordinated bringing together of various partial services is required, which can be achieved with less effort via hierarchical chains of command (cf. Coase, 1937, p. 392; Williamson, 1975, p. 50f.). One can argue about the extent to which the binary schematization of institutional economics and the reduction of motivations to numerically expressible cost ratios, which results from its viewpoint, does justice to the object targeted by a sociology of organizations. In any case, it can be evaluated as a hint to take a more sociologically systematic look at the specifically “agonal” contexts to which organizations owe their existence, in which they stand and within which they are supposed to bring certain advantages.24 Outside of an economic theory or a theory limited to economic organizations, there is of course no reason to reduce the possible contexts to formally peaceful “market-based contest[s]” (Marktkämpfe) of autonomous economies over price compromises (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 201). In other contests, warlike as well as peaceful, secular as well as spiritual, organizations can also promise advantages and therefore be sought. “Contest” in this context can be understood in a sufficiently broad sense, in line with Weber’s definition, to include certain relatively simple interactions in which the participants seek to assert a particular self-image against others’ ascriptions or to disparage the image that others seek to assert.25 The simplest figuration of advantageous association in basal combative situations is the coalition, a triadic figure in which one interaction partner joins with a second against a third, thereby gaining specific chances of asserting his interests: “Contention with one demands cooperation with the other. The dispute not only creates separation and dissociation, equally it creates connection and companionship, a mixed figuration of opposition and partnership” (Sofsky & Paris, 1991, p. 188; cf. also Albrecht, 2020b, p. 219f.). While a coalition is not yet an organization  – as well as the contexts in which organizations arise are arguably difficult to grasp as mere “interactions”  – organizations perform a comparable function within their context as coalitions do within interactions. Not all alliances within combat situations therefore mean organization formation. Apart from coalitions in interactions, they can also occur, for example, as larger alliances or as individual or repeated agreements between otherwise separate  In the (no longer quite so) new economic sociology, this reference was taken up in particular by Marc Granovetter in an influential essay which, while primarily a (not at all unjustified) critique of Williamson, takes up the basic agonal implications, with certain qualifications, as a source of sociological inspiration (cf. Granovetter, 1985, p. 503). 25  Such descriptions and sensitive systematizations of interactions as contests can be found impressively and in large numbers in Erving Goffman, which seems to have been pushed somewhat into the background by the sometimes very distorting translations in the German reception (cf. for example 1953, p. 38; 1967, p. 24ff.). 24

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organizational units with their own hierarchy, their own administrative staff and their own representatives. And even if a unified Verband is formed from the alliance, it need not necessarily be an organization – for example, not if it has no administrative staff. Organizations, however, often seem to have advantages over unorganized alliances, especially with regard to the collective capacity to act, which requires above all a representative with formal powers and an administrative staff that controls the implementation of decisions in coordinated individual actions. Particularly in warlike combat situations, rapid decision-making and a unified capacity for action made possible by efficient administration can be decisive, of which there are countless examples in world history, such as the victory of the Qin over the other contending empires in early Chinese history (cf. Bodde, 1986, p. 49ff.) or perhaps also the victory of the Spartans, who were also tightly organized politically, in the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, from a sociological point of view, no simple causality of “real” transaction cost advantages may be assumed, as more or less explicitly asserted by institutional economics. For the formation of organizations in the sense of the creation of hierarchically structured enterprises with labor division, only the hope, however justified, of certain advantages comes into question, which may and do regulary well differ from the actual advantage gains, which only ex ante and only possibly gain weight. This can be exemplified by the Christian monasteries of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, which the business economist Alfred Kieser has studied organizational sociologically following Max Weber’s sociology of religion. Already the early monasteries can be seen as organizations not only with regard to their internal structure, which had a rational planning of work, a formal order, a hierarchy with supervision, a spatial “clustering” of individuals closed off from the outside, including disciplining, even an internal education (cf. Treiber & Steinert, 1980, p. 56ff.; Kieser, 1987, p. 107ff.); also externally their creation can be understood most likely as aiming at certain “cost” savings. They arise essentially from the ascetic hermitage that ancient Christianity already knew. The early hermits usually lived in small charismatic colonies or in complete solitude in the deserts of North Africa or later in the European forests. They were perhaps less likely to be in actual physical conflict with other people or worldly powers, but they did face other opponents in a different “struggle”: namely, “the struggle to repel the demons that incessantly attacked them, but which were in fact nothing more than temptations of their physical and mental passions to lead them back to the earthly world” (Melville, 2012, p. 15). The first well-documented Christian union into an outwardly closed sociation with common rules of life – into a monastery, in fact – was initiated already in the early fourth century by the Egyptian hermit Pachomius and served essentially to counter the spiritual “dangers” of the eremitical “lone

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wolf” (cf. Melville, 2012, p. 18). Not for transaction cost advantages in economic-­ material competitive situations, but very much for “efficiency gains” in the “acquisition of salvation goods” in the inner struggle with worldly demons, Pachomius’ rules, like those of Benedict or Francis later, aimed. In fact, however, the ascetic work ethic and the rational planning of everyday life soon led to the fact that the monasteries also accumulated very worldly wealth, which led to a conflict with the ascetic ideals and consequently to numerous reform attempts and new religious orders (for example, the Cistercians or later the Franciscans), which, however, also did not escape the accumulation logic of an ascetic work ethic in the long run (cf. Kieser, 1987, p. 115ff.). So even if the monasteries were aiming at very specific “gains of advantage” in very specific, namely inner-spiritual “contests”, the structure of the monastic organization at the same time also conditioned quite different, material gains of advantage, which were not only unexpected by the founders of the order, but also clearly contradicted their ascetic intentions. Thus, hoped-for or expected advantageous gains of the formation of the organization are to be distinguished from the possible actual advantageous gains. Only the former can be considered causal to organization formation in a sociological sense of action. Even if, from a sociological point of view, the “cost savings” made possible by organizations should not be reduced to purely economic advantages in formally peaceful competitive situations, it does make sense to emphasize the formally “economic” character of the advantages, their reference to the scarcity of certain coveted material or immaterial goods on whose procurement costs savings can be made. This is what Heinrich Popitz has done in his sociology of rule, exemplified by very everyday “contested” situations, in which certain groups, through the formation of organizations, can gain control over certain coveted goods, or more generally: useful services, and thereby establish structures of rule through which they hope to perpetuate their advantages. According to him, on a cruise ship, for example, where there is competition among passengers for the few available deck chairs, a numerically smaller group can succeed in asserting a privilege over the rest of the passengers to use precisely these deck chairs. It achieves this first of all by collectively laying claim to a privilege which the remaining passengers reject as such in the first place. It therefore has a common positive interest, while the others are united only in their rejection of the privilege, but have no common conception of a positive redistribution of the deck chairs. As a result, the minority of claimants is, in Popitz’s words, “more capable of organization” than the majority of the other passengers and can therefore, by keeping the currently unoccupied deckchairs free for each other – for instance by means of threatening gestures, i.e. threats of physical violence – defend their claim of ownership (cf. Popitz, 1992, p. 190ff.). Once a group has formed in structurally combative situations that is able to assert its in-

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terests against a non-organized majority by means of a relatively simple form of mutual assistance or coordinated behavior, and thereby successfully assert a monopoly on certain utility services, it is usually also in a position to bind the interests of the other participants to its own or to neutralize them in various ways by staggering its participation in the monopoly yields (cf. Popitz, 1992, p.  211ff.). For example, the appropriated deck chairs can be “sublet” to certain persons who take over certain guarding tasks in return. Another example Popitz cites takes place in a halfway house for juveniles, in which a small group of juveniles succeeds, through threats of violence, in wresting half of their breakfast from the other inmates. For this purpose, they hire a “help squad” that receives a small portion of the squeezed-­ off bread. The core group keeps the largest part, but since the auxiliary group nevertheless receives a small “surplus”, it has an interest in maintaining the asymmetry (cf. Popitz, 1992, p.  218ff.). In purely formal terms, these examples are hardly different from a patrimonial ruler in Weber’s sense, who seeks to bind his administrative staff to himself with the help of the appropriation of economic opportunities and master rights and at the same time consolidates his claim to power over the rest of the population, or from a factory whose management creates certain foreman positions by means of wage scales, the owners of which act in a self-interested manner in the interests of the management on the basis of their privileges. In this respect, one can certainly speak of basal forms of organizational formation in Popitz’s examples. In each case, they result from a formally combative situation that either already exists, in the form of competition for the coveted but scarce deck chairs, or is first created by the combative appropriation of other people’s loaves by a single group. Historically far-reaching and empirically much more saturated, the so-called “epigenetic civilization theory”, which was developed in particular by the Danish anthropologist Jonathan Friedman in collaboration with the archaeologist Michael Rowlands and the anthropologist Kajsa Ekholm Friedman (cf. esp. Friedman & Rowlands, 2008), describes very similar processes as Popitz in his sociology of rule. In Germany, it was mainly received by Stefan Breuer, who combined it with a Weberian-oriented theory of rule and charisma and incorporated it into his sociology of the state. In Friedman and Rowlands, the theory initially refers primarily to social evolutionary processes in tribal societies, early states of “advanced civilizations” and ancient empires (cf. Ekholm Friedman & Friedman, 2008, p.  145; Friedman & Rowlands, 2008, p. 135f.). Breuer also includes, following Weber, the emergence and development of the modern rational institutional state (cf. Breuer, 1990, p. 44; 1998, p. 24). Even though the authors substantiate their descriptions with concrete archaeological and anthropological findings, the theory is so general that it can be applied to very different cultures and regions in the sense of an ideal

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type, whereby specific deviations can be identified and justified in each case. Moreover, the epigenetic theory of civilization does not view evolution as a directed process, but assumes – at least at the local level – dynamic cycles that can include both progressive and regressive tendencies (cf. Ekholm Friedman, 2000, p. 156; Friedman & Rowlands, 2008, p. 128f.). The starting point for consideration is egalitarian local groups structured through kinship relations (“lineages”), which are involved in supralocal material and matrimonial exchange networks at an early stage (cf. Friedman & Rowlands, 2008, pp.  89ff.). By obtaining an agricultural surplus and giving it away ceremonially, individual lineages can portray themselves as favored by the gods and thereby gain prestige, which in turn increases the bride price for women from their lineage, setting in motion a self-reinforcing accumulation process that runs toward material inequality and a symbolic hierarchy (cf. Breuer, 1990, pp. 46f.).26 Charismatic “chiefdoms” emerge that combine both political and hierocratic coercive mechanisms, but cannot easily monopolize them. Other legitimate instances with independent access to the “imaginary sources of wealth” persist, and there is a “constant struggle to prove the charism”- both materially and symbolically (Breuer, 1998, p. 31f.). However, the existing genealogical, relative hierarchy can solidify in the course of further developments and become an absolute hierarchy. This happens in particular when the chieftain lineage succeeds in asserting itself against its “competitors” and in asserting a monopoly on access to the gods and the salvific goods they donate, for instance by restricting the performance of certain rites to specialists under its control or by appropriating the production and distribution of certain “prestige goods” in which its divine charisma is objectified (cf. Breuer, 1990, p. 58). “Prestige goods,” comparable, for example, to the “rental” of deck chairs on the cruise ship or the payment of the auxiliary in the halfway house with bread, can initially only be used by the ruler himself to bind powerful elites or to consolidate military or matrimonial alliances. But if they are increasingly distributed in this way for purely strategic considerations, they tend, according to Breuer, to become a kind of “political currency” that is no longer directly tied to the charisma entrenched in the hierarchy and the personal bestowal by the ruler, but can circulate freely in the aristocracy, conferring prestige on its owner regardless of his genealogical status (cf. Breuer, 1990, p. 65). A “prestige goods system” emerges, characterized by rank struggles and centrifugal tendencies. The central ruler also comes under competitive pressure; he must  The public feasts of offerings often themselves already took on the form of a rank contest, as can easily be seen in the “potlatch” of the Kwakiutl and other Northwest American Peoples, which Marcel Mauss (2013, p. 24f.) has described as a “total performance of the agonistic type”. 26

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direct all efforts to control the circulation and production of prestige goods, thereby retaining the elites of the system. To this end, commercial production facilities, warehouses, and staging areas will be established in close proximity to the center, and artisans will be recruited from all parts of the dominated territory. To secure the supply of indispensable raw materials, foreign trade is increased; trading posts and colonies are established, slave hunts and expeditions are organized on the periphery. (Breuer, 1990, p. 65)

Not all of these measures signify the formation of organization in the sense meant here, but especially the administration of magazines and storage places and the production sites show organizational traits at a very early stage.27 The further ­development, which Breuer traces through the great “advanced civilizations” of Eurasia and the Americas, is characterized by centripetal phases, in which a dynasty or an urban center succeeds for a time in monopolizing the production and distribution of “prestige goods” or other coveted means of exchange and the political or hierocratic means of coercion, and centrifugal phases, in which smaller, peripheral sub-centers gain in importance, enter into competition with the central rule, and either eventually overthrow it or perish again themselves. Patrimonial states, large trading centres and entire empires emerge – and fade away again to make way for new ones (see also Ekholm Friedman & Friedman, 2008, p. 145). The only thing that seems constant is the latent or overt contest of political, religious and economic elites. Even if epigenetic civilization theory does not explicitly focus on it, it is often the formation of organizations that ultimately determines the success or failure of claims to power.

3.3 Combative Organisations Similar to Luhmann’s differentiation of society into individual functional systems, each with its own communication media, or Weber’s differentiation of different spheres of value (“Wertsphären”), each with its own claims and rationalities, a differentiation of different “types” of contests can also be traced, each based on its own “rules of the game” or mechanisms and each requiring different strategies. Thus the preconditions for victory in a warlike contest are based on quite different foundations than those for victory in a purely economic “price war” or in the contest for interpretive sovereignty with regard to certain visible or invisible forces. While “organizational formation” is an essential tool in a variety of such “types” of  Cf. on Sumer, for example, in Stefan Breuer himself (1990, p. 179), cf. on a very similar argument also David Graeber (2015, p. 175). 27

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contest, the particular requirements of each contest also specify certain structural choices and thereby ultimately different types of organization tailored to the particular requirements. Each individual “type of contest” and its respective organizations would require its own monographic elaboration, which would certainly be very worthwhile.28 Here they can only be dealt with in a sketchy manner, in accordance with the limited interest in knowledge. What should be emphasized above all is the insight that organizations in the general sense outlined above are identifiable in different combative situations even in the earliest historical times. In tribal societies, for example, the perpetuation of an agricultural surplus often depends on the enslavement of neighbouring populations through war campaigns or of parts of their own population through indebtedness, whereby the slaves are placed under uniform, hierarchical control and disciplined (cf. Friedman & Rowlands, 2008, p. 96; cf. also Terray, 1974, p. 327f.). If one does not apply the narrow criterion of “free” membership with partial inclusion, but only the criterion of “personal entry” described above, slave enterprises can also be considered organizations if their structure is consistent with the other criteria. In fact, early slave organizations seem to exhibit a much higher degree of continuity than the employment relationships of “free” craftsmen - and to that extent are more likely to be “organizations” in the sense meant here - since “free” craftsmen, for example in early Mesopotamia, were often employed only temporarily in the palace workshops, but otherwise had time for free contract work, which they performed from home or as disruptive work (cf. Steinkeller, 1996, p. 251; Van De Mieroop, 1997, p. 181). Although similar arrangements also existed for slaves in ancient Greece, for example, who were used by their masters as a source of rent with a relatively large degree of economic autonomy, typical alongside this was often their quartering and workshop work (cf. Kyrtatas, 2011, p. 102; cf. also Weber, 1950, p. 126f.). On the other hand, as Max Weber already pointed out, slave enterprises were usually not structured according to the division of labor, but rather formed an unorganized “accumulation of individual workers” (cf. Weber, 1998, p. 55f.; cf. also 1950, p. 127f.). If at least the differentiation into (free or unfree) supervisory instances and (unfree) direct workers existed, one can nevertheless speak of “division of labour” and insofar of organisations in the sense meant here. Even the military expeditions necessary to procure slave labor or other booty or prestige gains exhibited a certain degree of “organization” in their structure. In  For religious organizations, such a treatment is already available in Günter Kehrer’s “Organisierte Religion” (1982); it would have to be updated in detail if necessary, but it still offers fundamental insights both into organizations in general and especially into the significance of organized religious groups within the history of religion. 28

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terms of logistics, strategy and leadership, military campaigns already appear to be extremely “rational” in tribal societies, as the ethnologist Jürg Helbling in particular has pointed out (cf. Helbling, 2012). However, insofar as these are only individual expeditions without continuity and without a fixed headquarters, it is not yet possible to speak of organisations in the narrower sense. In view of protracted military conflicts and relatively long-standing, fortified field camps, however, the boundaries are blurred. Moreover, in numerous tribal societies there are already permanent warrior associations, which can partly be understood as organizations in the sense meant here, insofar as they know, for example, fixed hierarchies, a place of assembly and a “personal” entrance (cf. Schweizer, 1990, p. 27ff.). And many early advanced civilizations already knew standing armies with continuous local stationing, personal entry and fixed hierarchy, which performed both military and civilian services. In Egypt, for example, fortresses with permanently stationed ­mercenaries and professional soldiers emerged no later than the XIXth Dynasty (1292–1186 BC) (cf. Spalinger, 2005, p. 241). In early China, especially the eastern Han in their conflicts with the nomadic Hsiung-Nu and the Qiang used agricultural garrisons in the conquered and border areas, where conscript soldiers simultaneously practiced agriculture to provide for themselves and to make the terrain economically usable (cf. Ying-Shih, 1986, pp. 411, 427; Cosmo, 2002, p. 244). Overall, warlike contests and military threats may be seen as extremely fruitful for the emergence of organizations in many situations. Thus, defensive interests were often the occasion for military or socio-economic reforms, which frequently included the formation of organizations. The history of the Chinese conflict with the northern equestrian peoples contains countless examples of this (cf. Cosmo, 2002, pp. 134ff.; 202f., 236ff.). But also the various undertakings of Themistocles under the threat of the Persians refer to organizations, both with regard to the construction of the fortifications around Piraeus and the Attic fleet, as well as with regard to the mining of silver at Laureion necessary for its financing, and finally also with regard to the manning of the ships (cf. Meier, 1993, p.  270ff.). And quite similarly, the Prussian reforms in the face of the “world spirit on horseback” can be understood as “defensive modernization”, as Wehler aptly puts it, which was essentially aimed at the organizations of the government and the state administration, but also provided the impetus for numerous other organizations, for example in local self-government and not least in the field of science and education (cf. Wehler, 1987, p. 363; cf. also Nipperdey, 1987, p. 33ff.). On the other hand, the belligerent aggressor himself can also try to maintain his supremacy without a direct use of force, which is usually very cost-intensive, not fully calculable in its consequences and therefore risky. For this the formation of organizations is a typical means. The fact that the allocation of certain coveted

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prestige goods or sources of rent, such as tax rights or land, was often used strategically by rulers to bind powerful subjects to themselves and thereby maintain the existing order even without the direct use of force, has been emphasized after Max Weber by Heinrich Popitz, among others, and especially also by the epigenetic theory of civilization. Moreover, economic historians Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast have pointed out that it is often the enabling of the formation of organizations that is awarded as such privilege. Organizations, according to them, are usually based on both the self-interest of the participants and, essentially, the ability of third parties to enforce bilateral agreements (see North et al., 2009, p. 7). By granting such enforcement services only to certain military, religious, economic, etc., elites, the “ruling coalition” or “state organization”29 opens up sources of rents for them that can be extremely lucrative due to the high productivity of coordinated behavior based on the division of labor, while at the same time disciplining the elites themselves, whose incomes become dependent on the enforcement power of the state (cf. North et al., 2009, pp. 20, 30). Contrary to the assumptions of North and his colleagues, pre-modern organizations were probably not always solely dependent on the self-interests of the participants or the threats of violence by state authorities, but were able to draw on traditions, religious and material fears, or affective devotion to an idea or a person.30 Therefore, even in early societies, there are also non-elitist organizations and, in particular, organizations based on negative privileges, such as various religious sects, criminal or other secret societies, tenant societies such as those of the Roman publicani, or certain associations of strangers who, because of their strangeness, occupy certain neutral mediating positions, for example, among the Jewish and Frisian merchants of the early European Middle Ages (cf. Sprandel, 1985, pp. 26ff.; Badian, 1997, pp. 12, 92ff.). In terms of an ideal-typical description of specifically elite organizations and the analysis of their immense significance for economic-historical pro-

 According to North et al. the organization of the state itself is not “contractual”, i.e. it cannot fall back on any external enforcement of agreements and is based solely on the self-interest of the elites involved; the preservation of peace is therefore precarious if no further institutional safeguards are added (cf. North et al., 2009, p. 20). 30  This enumeration obviously follows Weber’s types of legitimacy, which, according to him, must be added to the purely purposive considerations of self-interest in relations of domination (cf. Weber, 2019, p. 338f.). 29

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cesses, the considerations of North and his colleagues cannot, however, be dismissed out of hand.31 The earliest organizations also include associations of religious specialists, who were responsible for the performance of rituals and the transmission of mythical knowledge.32 Religious associations also had organizational features in some cultures without writing, as can be illustrated, for example, by the druidic associations of the Celts (cf. Demandt, 1998, p. 45ff.). The advent of writing, however, created a new situation everywhere, since religious specialists now usually rose to become the main interpreters of written traditions as well as the teachers and guardians of literality (cf. Goody, 1996, pp.  16f.). Moreover, insofar as writing itself was regarded as sacred, and the written as the words of the gods, control over literality and written communication usually fortified the position of priests as mediators between the world of humans and the world of the gods, to which specific opportunities for power were attached, which Max Weber has subsumed under the concept of “psychic coercion” through the “distribution or denial of religious benefits” (Weber, 2019, p. 136). In this field, too, the formation of organizations with the aim of monopolizing the position of mediator can be interpreted as strategies in a structurally combative position – also, but not only, in the sense of the individual, inner struggle with worldly demons described above. Just as well there were “contests” between different religious cults or between (rather) religious and (rather) secular powers for the supremacy over the salvation of souls within a certain geographical area or, since the emergence of the universal religions, within the ecumeny. Political and religious actors were not always separated in this process, and even the separation of the various sources of power of physical and psychic coercion is of a rather analytical nature for large periods of history. As Günter Kehrer has shown, the organization of religious cults was historically mostly dependent on political centralization and nationalization, which also relied on religious-ritual standardization and identification, which in turn led to a sharp increase in the tasks and functions of religious specialists. While the earlier local cults could mostly still be taken care of by individual, kinship-designated specialists on call and without mediating or This is also true from the point of view of the “deviation” from the ideal type, for example, when criminal organizations can be described essentially by the fact that they have to make a considerably greater effort of their own to enforce their agreement, including threats of violence and the exemplary use of violence. 32  As Jonathan Friedman and Kajsa Ekholm Friedman suggest, temples as organized carriers of ritual and myth in Mesopotamia or Egypt seem to have historically preceded purely political or military organizations of rule; for this, however, they also had to combine redistributive functions and physical means of coercion (cf. Ekholm Friedman, 2000, p.  163; Ekholm Friedman & Friedman, 2008, p. 148). 31

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ganization or by the local chiefs themselves, the centralization resulted often – but, as the example of India shows, not always – in the necessity of a differentiation of various religious and administrative tasks and the connection of the same under uniform leadership based on the division of labor (cf. Kehrer, 1982, pp. 31, 38f.). This usually also had the consequence that religious offices, which were increasingly dependent on the training of certain skills and bodies of knowledge, gradually broke away from their attachment to automatic heredity within certain families, that certain permanent places of worship (temples) came into being, which required (and received) relatively permanent sources of income through votive gifts, endowments or sources of rent and the continuous purposeful action of an administrative staff for their care and maintenance, and that written forms of administration and the commemoration of myths and rites became established (cf. Kehrer, 1982, pp. 27, 32ff.). In this respect, early religious organizations are often closely related in their emergence to political struggles for hegemony over various local groups, but they can also gain structural autonomy, especially when they acquire non-revocable sources of income, as in early Egypt or in the Roman-­Christian Middle Ages (cf. Weber, 1998, pp.  78f.; cf. also Kehrer, 1982, pp.  59f.; Goody, 1996, pp. 55ff.). Since priestly offices were usually associated with prestige, the incumbents possessed an interest in giving the organization independence and permanence, which therefore often endured beyond the demise of the state systems, such as the Sumerian and Babylonian temples under the rule of the Persians and the Seleucids or the Egyptian temples under the Ptolemies and the Romans (cf. Kehrer, 1982, pp. 28f., 40f., 43). But also on this side of state privileges and the enforcement of certain local religious cults there were again and again more or less peaceful “contests” between religious groups for the recognition of exclusive access to the means of salvation. Examples of this can be found, for example, in the “contest” of the early Christians in Rome with the followers of Mithras and other cults, whose associations had at least partly organizational features, since they often at least had meeting places, ritual barriers to entry, formal hierarchies and reflexive orders (cf. Burkert, 1990, p. 45f.; Rüpke, 2007). The “victory” of early Christianity can certainly also be interpreted in terms of its “organizational advantages,” such as the existence of a continuous priestly administrative staff, a fixed hierarchy of offices, and paid office holders (cf. Kehrer, 1982, pp. 109ff.; Burkert, 1990, p. 55). Even in ancient Greece, where there were no religious monopoly organizations based on landlordship or state recognition, the oracles or the sanctuaries of Asclepius, for example, were able to become wealthy organizations by means of the votive gifts of private worshippers and state inquirers, which probably also had a great deal to do with “competitive” situations in which skilful self-marketing and

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not least the expedient use of bribes led to success (cf. Burkert, 1990, p.  36; Rosenberger, 2001, pp. 115, 161f.). Like the “secular” organizations, then, religious organizations usually stand in formally combative contexts of various kinds, where they promise advantages over non-organized groups or individual fighters, or as Günter Kehrer puts it: “What is true for the so-called natural environments does not lose its validity for the so-­ called supernatural environments, which are better controlled by specialized organizations than by less specialized individuals” (Kehrer, 1982, p. 29). In addition, of course, it must not be forgotten that religious organizations, too, have always stood in very “natural” environments at the same time. If one compares the theoretical and historical perspective only hinted at here with the institutional economic definition of organization, it can be said that the latter, while containing very stimulating considerations, clearly falls short in terms of content. Organizations do not emerge merely because of cost-cutting within peaceful price wars, but are created by exceedingly different expectations of advantage in exceedingly different social “arenas” or “contests.” They are also ­regularly related to the assertion of claims to power of various kinds. In general, therefore, it can be said that organizations are enterprises (Betriebsverbände) in the sense specified above. As a rule, they occur in formally combative situations, within which the actors promise themselves advantageous gains through permanent association, administrative staff, budgetary accounting, etc., whereby the association need not be a voluntary one: even slave organizations offer relative cost advantages under certain circumstances. Not all such associations are organizations, but organizations tend to be much more efficient than alliances or unstructured communations in terms of agency and assertiveness. The analysis of pre-modern – as well as modern – organizations cannot therefore stop at a mere identification and cataloguing of social entities that count as organizations according to their various characteristics described above. Rather, the question arises at the same time as to what “cost” savings or other benefits they are intended to achieve and in what combative fields. A distinction must be made between the intended savings and the de facto savings that may not be intended. Organizations, once created, can persist through the assertion of their power or lack of external attack even when they are objectively inefficient compared to “market” or still other forms of transactions. Like all sociations, they possess a kind of “inertial weight” that sustains their very being even beyond their functionality. And even in the founding situation itself, no monocausality of a particular combative situation can be assumed, but various motivations  – combative as well as non-­ combative (such as communation interests) – always play a role. Even a “necessity” of organizing due to the complexity of given circumstances or the scope of

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externally imposed tasks, which can hardly be interpreted as a strategic decision, would not fall outside the conception, insofar as the ability of organizations to cope with such tasks may well be evaluated as an “absolute” advantage over the inability of non-organized groups or individuals to do the same. And still monopoly situations, in which the superior military or salvific power of “state” or “church” organizations effectively prevents open contests for themselves or for other organizations within their territory, the structurally combative situation persists, since the preservation of the monopoly position must also be safeguarded against possible future resistance. In addition to sharpening the general sociological concept of organization, the expansion of the view into pre-modern realms also compels the consideration of modern organizations to search for the contests in which they are actively or passively, belligerently or peacefully, openly or latently entangled.

Conclusion

The ideal type of organization, as developed here following Max Weber, does not want to be understood as a catalogue of criteria with which an association with an administrative staff, reflexive order, personal entry, formal hierarchy or division of labor, housekeeping and accounting, and a common meeting place could be classified as an organization, which perhaps still identifies a “contest”, but would then have its end with that. It is rather a matter of a conceptual construct (Gedankenbild), which is neither historical reality or even the ‘true’ reality. It is even less fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumedas one instance. It has the significance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication of certain of its significant components. (Weber, 1949, p. 93)

No organization, as well as no other sociation or any other aspect of social reality, would be adequately described by such a compilation of individual characteristics. The criteria mentioned can rather be read as intensifications or “accentuation” in the sense of a very specific question – namely that of a structural comparability of pre-modern and modern organisations. From the perspective of other questions, certain features would certainly carry less weight and others, which may not have been mentioned here, would gain in importance. Even though the features are all taken or at least derived from Weber’s work, their synthesization into a systems concept of “organization” is not predetermined in Weber. In this respect, a certain degree of arbitrariness is inherent in their selection. If, moreover, it should appear inappropriate, even from the point of view of a limiting question, this can perhaps © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2022 P. Jakobs, Max Weber and the sociology of organization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40287-7

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Conclusion

be blamed in part, apart from my own limited expertise in the historical and archaeological disciplines touched upon, on the fact that it was necessarily oriented towards the determinations that a decidedly modernist sociology of organization has highlighted as significant. A less eclectic, more empirically and theoretically grounded definition of the term, on the other hand, would require special investigations with a universal historical orientation, but at the same time with a sociological approach to organizations, such as those presented, for example, by Günter Kehrer for religious organizations or also by Stefan Breuer  – without explicitly pursuing sociology of organization – for political ruling organizations. The aim of this work was thus not so much to provide a definitive ideal type of organization – if such an attribute can be attributed to an ideal type at all – but rather to highlight the unfoundedness of the self-limitation of a sociology of organization that is pre-­ decided in terms of modernization theory and to sketch out possible directions in which a historically oriented, i.e. not one-sidedly modernistically pre-decided, sociology of organization could look. As already mentioned, the historical location of organizations essentially depends on what is understood by “organization”. Even if scientific conceptualization is not completely free in its creative activity, but, especially in the cultural and social sciences, also has to work through theoretical legacies, conceptual history and everyday understanding, it nevertheless has enough autonomy to conceptually define its subject area in different narrow ways depending on theoretical orientation and epistemological interest. Therefore, the presented concepts of organization, as they have been presented by organizational sociology with regard to “modernity” or “postmodernity”, are quite justified within certain limits. They are “useful” in order to gain adequate insights into certain questions  – more can hardly be expected from a concept. What then, one might ask, is the added value of developing a concept of organization that is so broad that it also includes pre-modern organizations? On the one hand, one could answer, such a concept of organization does not necessarily have to be broader than one limited to modern entities. This is due to the fact that, on the other hand, a principled demarcation between pre-modern social entities and modern organizations, such as the sociology of organization usually makes rather casually, is extremely arbitrary. Even if “organization” has taken on a position in today’s “administered world” that is historically unparalleled in terms of pure quantity and meaning, there seems to be hardly any characteristic of “modern” organizations, from a purely structural point of view, that cannot also be found to a certain extent in “pre-modern” organizations. By sparing no effort to overlook such continuities, organizational sociology also distances its general concept from its current object of knowledge, whose character becomes more and

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more opaque to it the more it reflects general human predispositions or general social dynamics. This tempts organizational sociology, for example, as in Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl, to extend the concept of organization to social movements, networks, or families, which may be objectively understood as “organized” to some degree, but not as “organizations” in a sociologically unambiguous sense. Or it attempts to apply its own, specifically modernist concept of organization to social entities that are certainly regarded as organizations in everyday language, but strictly speaking do not satisfy the one-sided criteria of the concept – as in Stefan Kühl’s descriptions of coercive organizations or of start-up companies. A concept of organization that has been expanded to include pre-modern conditions, but at the same time has been conceptually sharpened as a result, can circumvent both aporias by being narrow enough to delimit organizations from other social forms on the one hand, and on the other hand broad enough to understand as an organization what does not want to conform to the ideals of modernity even today. A concept of pre-modern organization, or more precisely: a concept that understands both pre-modern and modern entities as organizations, without blurring all differences, but also without making them absolute, also helps the understanding of modern organizations. In contrast, an absolute definition of separation also in other areas usually leads to an overemphasis on minor deviations or ephemeral fashions. There is no instance of assessing one’s own historical situation that could separate the essential from the accidental and identify genuine “innovation”. Thus, for example, free, contractually regulated wage labour as a mass phenomenon can certainly be regarded as a significant fact of modern labour organizations – if it is set in absolute terms and thereby separated from other possibilities of “membership”, such as hereditary occupation or slavery, which no longer fall within the subject area of such a sociology of organisation, then precisely the assessment of its historical significance comes under pressure. On the other hand, the great importance that the common meeting place and continuity have had at all times, especially for the identity and disciplinary power of an organization, falls completely under the carpet, which is why new developments towards tele- and temporary work are today treated from the perspective of the sociology of work and industry rather than the sociology of organization, although they affect the structure of organizations quite substantially. Likewise, it is actually only through a historical examination of the “contest” in which organizations usually engage that the importance of the specific, unstable loyalty relationships that typically exist between organizational leadership and organizational members and are cultivated by means of graded privileges and personal rewards becomes clear. The relative disappearance of such relationships from industrial organizations as a result of the flourishing of so-called “financial market capitalism,” which David Graeber considers the central

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world-historical upheaval of the last 50 years (see Graeber, 2015, p. 18), has not yet been comprehensively studied by organizational sociology.1 Insofar as a sociological definition of organizations can hardly avoid also including their social “environments”, the sociologists of organization also extend the absoluteness of the separation of modernity and pre-modernity even beyond the organization – whether the opposition is now understood in the sense of rational/ irrational, exchange value/use value or functional/stratificatory. More or less well concealed in the representational analysis is the theory of history, and into it extends the old teleology that has been characteristic of sociology since Saint-Simon and Comte, and which it has hardly ever completely gotten rid of since then. In contrast, the continuity of the struggle and the means employed in it, which has been highlighted here with Weber, seems more reminiscent of Nietzsche’s theory of history, the “silent guest” in Weber’s work, for whom, contrary to all teleology, all modernization theory and all other claims to absoluteness, the world was conceived in an eternal becoming and passing away: a monster of force, without beginning, without end, a fixed, brazen magnitude of force, which does not grow larger, does not grow smaller, which does not consume itself, but only transforms itself, as a whole unchangingly large, a household without expenditures and losses, but likewise without increase, without income, enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary, nothing blurred, nothing wasted, nothing infinitely extended, but as a definite force inserted into a definite space, and not into a space that would be ‘empty’ anywhere, but as a force everywhere, as a play of forces and waves of force at once one and many, accumulating here and at the same time diminishing there, a sea of storming and flooding forces, eternally changing, eternally receding, with immense years of recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, drifting out of the simplest into the most varied, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest into the most glowing, wildest, most self-contradictory, and then returning from the fullness to the simple, from the play of contradictions back to the pleasure of unison, affirming itself still in this sameness of its trajectories and years, blessing itself as that which must eternally return, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no weariness, no fatigue –

1 

 Gerald F. Davis’ pointed thesis of the end of the society of organizations” (cf. Davis, 2009, p. 27), which refers to this very process, “overlooks”, on the other hand, the fact that the financialization of the economy also means the formation of organizations at the level of the financial market, which also take up general forms of the cultivation of loyalty in organizations in a typical form. 1

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