Crucial Issues in the Field of Work and OrganizationalPsychology:
by H. Peter Dachler, St Gallen University, Switzerland

Overlooked, Forgotten, Neglected?

The call of our Newsletter Editor, Miriam Erez, to start a discussion in our Newsletter with areview of the most important issues that attract (or should attract) the attention and effort ofpsychologists in W/O psychology is an excellent idea, to which I am happy to give somethought. However, the more I think about and discuss it with some of my colleagues, themore difficult this becomes, if it is to be more than simply relieving our collective conscienceby heart felt admonitions of what would be desirable.

Miriam Erez introduced her idea by saying that I believe that the mission of our association is to address society's most urgent problems all over the world, and to offer solutions to the problems in a variety of areas that are represented by our thirteen divisions.

In this spirit I would like to define the usefulness of an issue with respect to two basic andinterdependent questions. One is how can we significantly enlarge and broaden ourunderstanding of problems our societies confront. The second, and related question addressesthe problem of our discipline's ability to generate alternative or world enlarging' solutions. Bythis I mean solutions which are sensitive to the ubiquitous pitfall of claimed improvementswhich leave the existing, taken-for-granted assumptions in place and therefore generate whatcan fundamentally be only more of the same (Watzlawick et al., 1974; Dachler & Hosking,1995). We have to keep in mind our conception of what W/O psychology is and what it isnot, i.d., the dominant paradigm of our discipline. This provides the context in which certainstates of affairs in society are, understood as problems in need of solution, and others ignoredor unrecognized as problems. But, despite their close interconnection, it may be useful tosummarize separately the urgent problems concerning our discipline, the way we conductscience and application, and the societal topics which seem in urgent need of being addressedby W/O psychology.

In our discipline, political processes, i.e., social processes that give voice to someperspectives, values and interests and at the same time mute other voices, have been addressedprimarily as processes which act on our discipline from the outside. This is the often invokedideal of objectivity in terms of the neutrality of science and the related obstacles to the growthof knowledge. However, it is precisely through our efforts to de-politicize our discipline thatwe ignore, and take for granted, the politics of the dominant institutional structures, priorities,research strategies, technologies and languages. Through the practices and culture of what wethink of as normal or authoritative science we legitimate particular scientific policies andpractices by certifying them as objective and rational, normal and natural. In this way certainprivileged groups gain, usually without deliberateness or awareness, the information andexplanatory or interpretative hegemony to advance their priorities. Thus we conceptualizemethodology (i.e., that which is described in a research report) as functioning only in thecontext of justification. It is considered relevant only after a problem is identified as ascientific one. It is only after a project is already constituted that scientific methods ofresearch (central concepts, hypotheses, testing procedures and research technologies, etc.)come into play. However, Harding (1993), in line with others, has justifiably warned: as criticafter critic has pointed out, it is in the context of discovery that culture-wise assumptions, orat least culturally-preferred ones, shape the very statement and design of the researchproject, and therefore select the methods. It is like assigning the fox to watch out forintruders in the chicken coop to assign responsibility for identifying constituting values to thevery methods these values have selected, p. 17.

We are confronted with an increasingly international, multi-cultural world, in which groups,whose priorities and ways of understanding that which is real are less privileged in differentregions and cultures, more vociferously articulate democratic values, drawing attention totheir standpoint as just as legitimate as the taken-for-granted and privileged standpoint. Howcan W/O psychology effectively deal with such highly conflictual problems and the constitutivebarriers to shared knowledge and mutual understanding, when we neglect or treat as taboo thequestion of the political processes which legitimize our research questions and methods?

In this context we must also question the extent to which the general paradigm of W/OPsychology, still strongly based on the comparatively huge research output of Anglo-Saxonspeaking countries, essentially acts to colonize other cultures. To what extent does the W/Opsychology literature and the teaching by western experts inadvertently impose a particularworld view on third world countries through our particular research questions? The questionsthat appear so rational and make sense in the context of the dominant managerial and primarilymasculine perspectives, may look very different from those which emerge out of other culturalstandpoints and practices. In the context of the natural and professionally legitimizedparadigm of W/O psychology, other questions and methods are likely to be seen as notscientific or as methodologically unsophisticated.

This is something many researchers from non-English speaking countries find out when theytry to publish in international journals, mainly edited in the tradition of the dominant paradigmand with respect to the corresponding scholarly literature already In place. In this sense it maybe necessary explicitly to question the extent to which certain research questions and methodsmay be constricting or even worse, subverting some of the fundamental assumptions, valuesand norms of other cultures, particularly ones that at present are quite different from theconceptions of work and social relations in the leading industrialized societies. So, we mustaddress the problem of how our discipline can generate strong objectivity (Harding, 1991). Such an approach explicitly sets out to identify widespread cultural values and interests ratherthan only those of the company men and women of the disciplinary traditions. The aim wouldbe to sort out the values and interests that can enlarge over those that unnecessarily limit theunderstanding of nature and social relations. it must be a high priority in a division oforganizational psychology, that is a part of an international association, like IAAP, to askwhose voice is privileged in our research and application and whose voice is not heard ormuted.

Central to the political problem is the impact of underlying epistemological assumptions. Many of us feel that such concerns belong to the discipline of philosophy of science; or, if atall relevant to psychology, then only to fields that address the determinants and restrictingcircumstances of creativity, etc. I would like to suggest that questions that deal with theprocesses by which we come to understand something as knowledge (as opposed to fiction orfairy tales) are at least as important as our traditional focus on how we justify (e.g. validate)our claims to knowledge. It is only through trying to understand the social processes, theongoing discursive interactions by which we collectively come to understand something asreal, as having ontology, that we can get a handle on what is a problem in need of solution. Rather than treating as unproblematic the taken-for-granted approaches of W/O psychology,we have to start finding ways, by which the meaning of what we do becomes an explicit pointof discussion and evaluation in our research and consulting activities. In an applied socialscience, like ours, such a discourse must involve not only the discipline-experts, but as equalpart in discussion, also other relevant standpoints (e.g., standpoints of practitioners, of peoplewho are unemployed or who work outside of or on the edge of the economically definedworld of work, of third world cultures, etc.). Which state-of-affairs are seen as crucialproblems, how such problems are defined and the kind of discussions that we attempt to reachmust become a domain of discussion involving both the dominant as well as the usually mutedvoices.

Despite the self-evidence of relatedness in human experience and activity, W/O psychology, inthe tradition of general psychology, has pretty much glossed the problem of what social meansin the context of work and organizing. We have generated an enormous amount of veryinteresting and certainly useful research on problems of interactions among individuals andgroups. The problem of person-environment interaction is a basic problem area that guidesour theoretical and empirical analyses. but we have neglected to really take seriously thefundamental relatedness of human experience. Implicitly in place is a particular definition ofthe central meaning of relationships, before we even start to conduct our research. This kindof understanding or relationship is taken-for-granted and therefore becomes a privileged (andhardly challenged ontology relative to other possible alternatives within our discipline. In thehistorically grown tradition of western thought we implicitly differentiate between, on the onehand a knowing and active subject, implicitly understood as an entity, who has certainproperties, intentions, goals, interests, values, etc. On the other hand, there are (less active)other persons, groups or physical arrangements (also seen as entities) on whom subject actsaccording to his or her priorities. In this basic subject-oriented differentiation the relationshipsare always among entities who have relative clear boundaries. As long as the social isimplicitly referenced to individuals and groups as entities, the relationship among them must bereduced to some sort of (causal) influence processes, that take their meaning from theproperties and behaviors of the interacting entities. Given this unquestioned set ofassumptions, we run into serious problems when we attempt to understand collectiveprocesses or when we try to take seriously the fundamental relatedness of human nature.

Currently central issues that have to do with complex, highly dynamic, unpredictable andambiguous problems become difficult to understand from an individual, entitativepreconception. Researchers have recognized that issues, such as the culture of anorganization, or the ability of an organization to learn, are of central importance. Butapproaching such fundamentally collective or social issues from an individual, entitativepoint-of-view raises more questions than it can answer meaningfully and usefully for thescientist as well as for the practitioner. It becomes increasingly obvious that we have to startasking questions about how through social-communicative processes certain understandingscome to be seen as a reality, as a privileged ontology, as contrasted with other possiblerealities. A dominant and taken-for-granted logic is often what prevents an organization (anda discipline for that matter) to learn to understand certain issues differently, i.e., to start actingin the context of different realities. Researchers such as Schön (1983), Gergen (1993),Sampson (1988), Weick and Roberts (1993), Czarniawska-Joerges (1994), Calas and Smircich(1991), Dachler and Hosking (1995) and others have pointed out and given examples of theproblems outlined above.

However, while they start being reviewed in the literature (e.g., Wilpert, 1995) they are seenas theoretical issued like any other content issues (e.g., leadership control and power), withoutrecognizing them as meta-context, which raise crucial and usually ignored problems for all ofthe traditional topic areas addressed in the literature. For instance, is it not possible that thecentral problems addressed by the concepts of motivation or personality would radicallychange, if we doubted the usefulness of the taken-for-granted assumptions of persons asentities with given traits and possessions that determine behavior, and abandoned thesubject-object differentiation in thinking about relationships?

Within the context of the above arguments it becomes understandable why interdisciplinaryresearch, although so often invoked with respect to applied research, has been more talk thanaction. To the extent that we do not address the kinds of taken-for-granted briefly outlinedabove, the usually observed practice of each discipline or research program taking its piece ofthe total research pie for analysis will continue. The basic problem of seldom being able toprovide a truly interdisciplinary solution will remain.

By recognizing the extent to which different understandings of a complex problem have theirorigins in different taken-for-granted, epistemological assumptions of different disciplines, itmight become possible to explicitly address these different standpoints. This might involvedeliberate and explicit negotiation processes and mutual attempts at understanding each othersparadigmatic assumptions and traditions. Thus rather than further fractionizing the disciplinesinto smaller and smaller subdisciplines, broader, more holistic and interdisciplinarily conceivedproblem definitions might become more meaningful. As a consequence, alternative andworld-enlarging- solutions may become more likely.

Knowledge and relational processes in organizing within multi-cultural, multiple perspectivesettings. Within the constraints of our disciplinary paradigm the fundamental issue ofknowledge and knowing in the context of organizing has received little attention beyondunderstanding it as a possession of individuals and defining the problem a some of individualdifferences and their aggregation. Knowledge as a problem of corporate epistemology (vonKrogh, Ross & Slocum, 1994), i.e., collective knowledge embodied in action sequences(knowledge how), encultured in the social process of achieving shared understandings,embedded in the systemic routines or encoded in various signs and symbols, can hardly befound in the W/O literature (cf. Blackler, in press). Although crucially relevant to ourdiscipline, we seem to think such topic areas to be only appropriate to the more sociologicallyoriented literature of organization studies. In the increasingly multi cultural, interconnectedand rapidly changing organizational world new and pressing problems emerge, like thelearning process of organizations, the various management issue of dealing with multiculturalworkforce, the hardly addressed consequences for all of the selection and training issues, andthe consequences of work being increasingly knowledge work. With respect to all these kindof social process issues an entitative, individualistic epistemological foundation of ourparadigm is fundamentally limiting by restricting the basic meaning of knowledge, process andsocial relations to one particular standpoint.

Moreover, issues like inter-cultural communication and conflict, the processes by whichcertain claims are given privileged voice, whereas other voices are muted (i.e. powerprocesses) are hardly issues of central concern to W/O psychology. Finally, in our emphasison masculine, managerial-administrative priorities, we have hardly given any attention to suchworld-wide acting international organizations like the United Nations, the World HealthOrganization, the World bank, etc. who are engaged not in production of goods and services,but in peace-keeping, ecology and health maintenance, etc. (e.g., Cooperrider & Pasmore,1991). Nor does W/O psychology seem to see much value in dealing with work that does notengage primarily in world structuring (i.e., men's work) but in care-work (i.e., women'swork), such as volunteer work, women's groups of other self-help organizations, let alone thework of raising children, educating people, taking care of the elderly and less privilegedgroups in general. Why does W/O psychology consider primarily paid work as work? Whydoes care work not also become a central problematic of Work and OrganizationalPsychology?

As Sampson(1988), Gergen (1995) Dachler & Hosking (1995) and others have pointed out, thetaken-for-granted assumptions that help define as scientific the major topics in W/Opsychology include the central idea that the individual, as subject is creator and architect oforder. Order is implicitly understood from the subject's point of view in terms such asbalance, predictability, rationality, and goal-directness. Thus, whether we talk aboutmotivation, learning, intelligence, leadership, structure, successful and efficient performanceand most of the other central topic areas of our discipline, these implicit and hardly questionedor tested assumptions essentially stand in the way of generating fundamental alternatives. Byfundamental alternatives are meant those that enlarge the implicitly taken-for-grantedconceptual context in which to define situations that are unpredictable, equivocal, complexand self-organizing.

For example, in selection research we have hardly found it necessary to seriously deal with jobanalyses, performance, validity, negative impact, the basic meaning and assessment ofindividual differences, etc. in the context of rapidly changing work, unpredictable andequivocal task situations and self-organizing processes. In such contexts the meaning of traitsas attributes of entities becomes increasingly difficult to justify meaningfully (e.g., Herriott, 1992; Dachler,1989).

Another crucial example is the issue of organizational change and development whichhas not produced any significant new understanding over the last 30 years. This is not likelyto change as long as we approach such topics from an entitative perspective, treatingorganizations as if they were entities with objectively given attributes, boundaries andrationally derived goals. The idea that organizations can perhaps better be understood ascomplex interwoven knowledge or understanding-structures may open up alternativequestions about changing organizations that are more meaningful with respect to a complexand increasingly less predictable world. Change is then not an issue of changing attributes andbehaviors of aggregated individuals and organizational structures. Rather change becomes aprocess of interlocking conversations and mutual searching for common understandingsthrough which changes occur in the way people know and understand as real themselves andtheir social world. It is time to approach many of our central topic areas is W/O psychologyfrom a perspective, which is more meaningful and in that sense more useful in dealing with aworld that is far less predictable, equivocal, controllable and structurable than ourpreconceptions assume.

So what? I can well imagine that the kind of issues I have raised as central may not at all bewhat many colleagues had expected. They might very well have concentrated on contentissues. But since problems to be addressed are neither God-given nor do they existindependently of what we come to believe as objective realities, I very strongly feel that wehave to start asking long neglected process questions. We restrict ourselves immensely bydealing with content, as if it was self-evident that a particular content is real, whereas someother possible content is not part of normal science. True application or practice-orientedsocial science cannot get around the task of understanding in detail, how certain real worldstate-of-affairs come to be understood as problems, whereas other circumstances remainunproblematic or become problems only at some other stage of history. In any case, I hopethat through the ensuing discussion we can better collectively construct the reality of ourdiscipline and its meaning for society.

Blackler, F. (in press), Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview andinterpretation, Organization Studies.

Calas, M.B. and Smircich, L. (1991), Voicing seduction to silence leadership. OrganizationStudies, 12(4), 567-601.

Cooperrider, D. and Pasmore, W.A. (1991), The Organization, Dimensions of Global Change. Human Relations. 44(8), 763-785.

Czarniawska-Joerges, B. (1994), The Three-dimensional Organization: AConstructionistView. Lund: Sweden: Chartwell Bratt.

Dachler, H.P. (1989), Selection and the organizational context. In P. Herriot (ed.),Assessment and Selection in Organizations, Chichester: Wiley, 45-70.

Dachler, H.P. and Hosking, D.M. (1995), The primacy of relations in socially constructingorganizational realities. In D.M. Hosking, H.P. Dachler & K.J. Gergen (eds.), Managementand Organization: Alternatives to Individualism. Aldershot, England: Avenury.

Gergen, K.J. (1993), Toward Transformation of Social Knowledge, 2nd edition. NewYork/Berlin: Springer.

Harding, S. (1993), Feminist philosophy of science: The objectivity question. Presentation atthe International Conference Out of Margin, Feminist Perspectives on Economic Theory,June, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Harding, S. (1991), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Womens Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Herriot, P. (1992), Selection: The two subcultures. European Work and OrganizationalPsychologist, 2(2): 129-140.

von Krog, G.F., Roos, J. and Slocum, K. (1994), An essay on corporate epistemology. Strategic Management Journal, 15, 53-71.

Sampson, E.E. (1988), The debate on individualism. American Psychologist, 43(1): 15-22.

Schön, D.A. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Weick, K.E. and Roberts, K.H. (1993), Collective mind in organizations: headful interrelatingon flight decks. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(3): 357-381.

Wilpert, B. (1995), Organizational behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 46: 45-90.

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