Images of Organisation

Citation

Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization (Updated ed.). Sage Publications.

Chapter Summary

The updated edition runs to about 500 pages in three parts: a one-chapter overview, seven chapters that each examine organizations through a different metaphor, and a closing part on practice. Each metaphor chapter ends with a section on the strengths and limitations of that image, so every lens is presented together with its blind spots. A new preface sets the book in today's business environment, and the references and tables have been refreshed.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The single chapter of Part I sets out the book's premise: all theories of organization and management rest on implicit images or metaphors, which open up insight but also distort. The rest of the book is built on this claim.

Chapter 2: Mechanization Takes Command: Organizations as Machines

The machine image is traced through mechanical thinking and the rise of bureaucratic organization, then through classical management theory and scientific management, and ends with the strengths and limitations of the metaphor.

Chapter 3: Nature Intervenes: Organizations as Organisms

Here the organization is seen as a living system with needs and an environment. The sections move from organizations as open systems to contingency theory, the "variety of the species", and the population-ecology and organizational-ecology views.

Chapter 4: Learning and Self-Organization: Organizations as Brains

The brain image leads to organizations as information-processing systems, to cybernetics and the question whether organizations can "learn to learn", with guidelines for learning organizations, and to the holographic brain and its principles of design.

Chapter 5: Creating Social Reality: Organizations as Cultures

The chapter treats organization as a cultural phenomenon shaped by wider cultural context, looks at corporate cultures and subcultures, and asks whether culture is a matter of rule following or of enacting a shared reality.

Chapter 6: Interests, Conflict, and Power: Organizations as Political Systems

Organizations are read as systems of government and of political activity. The chapter analyses interests, conflict and power, and ends with managing pluralist organizations.

Chapter 7: Exploring Plato's Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons

Favoured ways of thinking can trap people. The sections link organization to the unconscious: repressed sexuality, the patriarchal family, death and immortality, anxiety, shadow and archetype.

Chapter 8: Unfolding Logics of Change: Organization as Flux and Transformation

Four logics of change are examined: autopoiesis, chaos and complexity with its implications for managing, mutual causality (loops rather than lines), and dialectical change driven by opposing forces.

Chapter 9: The Ugly Face: Organizations as Instruments of Domination

The darker side of organizing: domination, class and control, work hazards and occupational disease, workaholism and stress, and the role of multinationals in the world economy.

Chapters 10–12: The Challenge of Metaphor; Reading and Shaping Organizational Life; Postscript

Part III turns to practice. Chapter 10 returns to how metaphors create ways of seeing and acting. Chapter 11 works through the Multicom case, building a "reading" and storyline of an organization and then looking at it from another view. A short postscript closes the text, followed by bibliographic notes for each chapter.

Key Concepts

Chapter 1

• Metaphor as a way of seeing: every image of organization emphasizes some features and hides others.

Chapters 2–4

• Machine, organism and brain images: bureaucracy and scientific management, open systems and contingency, and learning and self-organization are the theories associated with each.
• Learning to learn: the question of whether organizations can question their own norms, raised through cybernetics.

Chapters 5–6

• Culture as enacted reality: organizational reality is created by shared meanings, not only by rules.
• Interests, conflict and power: organizations treated as arenas of political activity.

Chapters 7–9

• Psychic prison: organizations that trap members in favoured ways of thinking.
• Autopoiesis and mutual causality: self-producing systems and circular rather than linear causes.
• Dialectical change: opposing forces as the driver of transformation.
• Domination: organizations as instruments of exploitation of employees and societies.

Chapters 10–12

• Reading an organization: using several metaphors in turn to interpret a situation and shape action.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A single organizing device. Every metaphor chapter follows the same plan: the image, the theories it has inspired, and a closing assessment of strengths and limitations. This lets a reader compare the images directly.
• Breadth of theory. Classical management, open-systems and contingency theory, population ecology, organizational learning, culture, power, psychoanalytic ideas, chaos and complexity, dialectics and critical views of domination are all gathered in one framework.
• Practice built in. Part III, with its worked Multicom case, shows how several metaphors can be applied to one organization, which the publisher presents as translating theory into practice.
• Sage's description also calls it a classic of the management literature that has been in print for over twenty years, a point that supports its usefulness as a reference.

Limitations

• Length and density. At roughly 500 pages the book contains a great deal of theory per chapter; some chapters, such as the political and flux chapters, are especially long.
• A framework rather than a method of study. The book is about interpreting organizations; readers looking for empirical methods or psychological measurement will need other sources.
• Edition scope. The updated edition refreshes references and tables and adds a preface, but keeps the original structure, so very recent management practice is handled only through the new preface.

Where It Fits in the Course

Morgan is best read early in an organizational-psychology course as a map of the field. It is a conceptual overview rather than a textbook of research findings, and it sets out the metaphors behind many of the theories met elsewhere. Karl Weick's Sensemaking in Organizations and the collection Making Sense of the Organization take up the interpretive and enactment themes of the culture and flux chapters in depth, while Schein's Organizational Culture and Leadership develops the culture image into a full analytic model.

For readers who want a conventional textbook with research evidence, Spector's Industrial and Organisational Psychology, the OpenStax Organizational Behavior and the edited introduction by Chmiel, Fraccaroli and Sverke cover the standard topics. Fineman, Gabriel and Sims's Organizing and Organizations is a closer companion because it is also a broad introduction that combines theory with real-world examples. Dawson and Andriopoulos and Hayes treat change management in more applied depth than Morgan's flux chapter.

How to Use This Book

The book suits upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and managers with some exposure to organization theory; no technical prerequisites are needed. Start with Chapter 1 and then the machine, organism and culture chapters, which map onto the most familiar management theories. Use the closing strengths-and-limitations section of each chapter as a quick check on what each image leaves out.

A practical plan: read Chapters 1–6 in order, choose from Chapters 7–9 according to interest (Chapter 9 for critical perspectives, Chapter 8 for complexity and change), and finish with Chapters 10–11. Then take an organization you know, such as a workplace or student society, and write a short reading of it through three different images, following the Multicom example. The bibliographic notes at the back give chapter-by-chapter pointers to the underlying literature.