G. Coates | "Motivating
the Masses : Identity and the Self." |
Abstract.
Much has been written about motivational aspects of employment and the attempts by employers to effect its motivational outcomes in everyones best interests. The vast majority of this debate has taken place within a psychological dialectic and its inherent social engineering problematic. Rarely has this problematic delved deeply into the social production of identity, norms and attitudes in anything other than an attempt to isolate and manipulate these as objective variables. The intention of such writers has been to prescribe action with pre-defined outcomes. The reverse of this social engineering problematic, and one which is attended to in this paper, focuses on the social construction of work effort. This paper, therefore, seeks to engage with individuals own meanings and reasons for acting in work and social settings. The paper explicates the social construction of self within the work place before critically examining the psychological conception of individuals reasons for expending effort in organisations. This is accomplished through the analysis of the failings of a number of motivation theories and the utilization of more socially oriented conceptions of the individuals self to redress the perceived omissions. The work of Shamir (1990) will be used to promulgate an alternative view of self-conception within work and life. Hence individuals emerge as a reflexive, intelligent beings, capable of imputing definitions for, and rationally justifying, their own actions.
Introduction.
Much has been written about motivational aspects of employment and the attempts by
employers to maximise its outcomes. The vast majority takes place within a psychological
dialectic and its social engineering problematic. However, rarely has this problematic
delved deeply into the social production of identity, norms and attitudes in
anything other than an attempt to isolate and manipulate these as objective variables, the
intention being to prescribe action with pre-defined outcomes (cf. Jamal 1986). Moreover,
even current reviews - by motivation theorists - of theories concerning attitudes towards
work, are unanimous in their dissatisfaction with present ideas. These they argue do not
fit epistemologically or empirically to the findings of much of the research
(cf. Locke and Henne 1986; Landy and Becker 1987). Thus conceptual thought and research
outcome do not marry into a teleological whole. The reverse of this social engineering
problematic, and one which is attended to here, seeks to engage with an individuals
own meanings and reasons for acting as they do in social settings. Thus the individual
emerges as a reflexive, intelligent being, capable of imputing definitions for, and
rationally justifying, their own actions.
The paper seeks to delineate the essence of motivation theories and cast them into a broad
pattern for analysis.1 In doing so the paper categorises
motivation theories under 5 main areas. The paper then attempts to explicate the social
construction of self within the work place before critically examining the
psychological conception of individuals own reasons for expending effort in
organisations. This is accomplished through the analysis of a number of its failings and
the utilization of sociological conceptions of the individual to redress the perceived
imbalance. However, although many psychological theories of motivation are criticised, the
intention is not a tirade against psychology; but an attempt to illustrate how one
social-psychologist attempts to marry the two ideologies in terms of the individual. By
distancing himself from the social engineering elements of the former and adopting a
notion of the individuals self as paramount in the work place, Shamir (1990) avoids
notions of individuals as empty vessels, responding to external stimuli which they have
very little control over (Mead 1934). Shamir also argues that unless work is changed to
meet the socially negotiated requirement of an individuals identity, it will remain
a chore for the vast majority of people enacting its rigours.
Reflexivity, Self and Meaning.
Existing theories practised in organisations, concerning motivational aspects of
individual workers and their attitudes, are mainly psychological in origin. Meanings here
have little explanatory power. Thus motivation theory encompasses many sub-theories, the
main ones are:
Although Maslows needs hierarchy has been severely criticised (e.g. Thompson and
McHugh 1991), many introductory texts still begin with lists of pre-defined needs of the
individual worker. Makin, Cooper and Cox (1989:32) state:
The list of all our needs is ... very long. What we
require is some form of theoretical structure that will help organise ... needs or
potential motivators, into smaller more manageable categories.
Such a view inhibits understanding of how individuals, as reflexive beings can shape
their own social reality through - active - social interaction (Goffman 1959). In this
paper, the meanings behind employees willingness to expend effort cannot be divorced
from their real world and made to appear as an objective technology of behaviourism,
as motivation theory assumes:
If we are trying to get someone to learn a new behaviour then it is appropriate to reinforce their successful attempts every time they occur. (Makin, Cooper and Cox 1989:54)
This position negates, for all intents and purposes, the input of the individual in
question as cognitive. It also negates any influence other than the immediate environment
they exist within I.e. work. Individuals become units, as with all positivistic theories
of society, manipulable as objects without consciousness. However, people take what
meaning they can from whatever sources are available, inside and out of the work
environment, and use them to enhance and understand both the image they have of themselves
and those of others. The experiential consequences of workplace reality moreover are
negotiated, part of everyday life, physical and mental. The physical aspects are to be
found in the valued product of peoples labours, but the mental aspects are the fluid
negotiations of self. It is thus the amount that people buy into organisational culture -
through the symbolic (en)action of organisational rituals, dramas, myths etc. - that
provides the definition of organisational self/individual and the meanings behind
motivation (Golden 1992; Whipp et al 1989). This is not assailable by management control,
though perhaps partially under certain complex circumstances.
The meanings individuals impute are negotiable, created like any other discourse, where
meaning and response depend upon the varying expectations associated with their position
or role. Organisations can thus be understood as social constructions and arrangements.
They are the outcome of interactive patterns of human activity rather than pre-given
structures into which people are slotted. While an organisation may be experienced and
described as a thing, what is in fact being experienced are institutional
processes. Organisations are in peoples heads and hearts - they are common sense
(Ahrne 1990). Organisations are thus fictions, but they are fictions people grasp, protect
and mythologise, until they become solid permanent objects. This is the reification of an
organisational reality. However, the organisation is continually being negotiated, as an
inter-subjective world where individuals experience their lives.
To understand individuals actions within organisations we need to appreciate that
the self, the reflected image structuring conduct, is something which develops. It is not
initially existent at birth, but arises through the processes of social experience and
activity (Mead 1934). Thus it develops in the given individual as a result of their
relations to the social world and its processes as a whole and to other individuals within
that process. Furthermore, the individual experiences themself as a person only
indirectly, from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social
group or from the generalised standpoint of the social group as a whole to which they
belong (Evetts 1992). Thus personality and self develops within discourse and the
interplay of cultural symbols - signifiers (signs) and the signifieds (Lash 1990).
The activity of individuals and social groups is thus the primary reality and a foundation
for the development of consciousness and the self. Human behaviour is not an endless
string of nervous responses, but consciously attuned social conduct. Descartes believed
that the individuals self- experience as a distinct and unique personality is given
in the human ability to think (Kenny 1968). The self only appears because reference can be
made to the self in such a way; hence, "I think therefore I am". The problem
with such a philosophical view is that it creates a dualism between mind and body - not to
mention person/society. Individuals though are holistic in their entity, they may have
notions of realities they wish to enact, but they are fully aware of their physical -
bodily and institutional - limitations. Thus the self is derived from the
individuals place within social relations and physical interdependencies. The act of
an individual is both a response to the situation and a stimulus to provoke action in
others. Individuals must become aware of the totality of activity in the group, and the
place of their own self and that of others within it, in order to plan their actions
according to their role. This is the self consciousness gained from communication by
gesture and language, out of which interpretation and social bonding takes place (Habermas
1992). The gestures, dialogue, etc., only become signs (signified) through social
interaction, meaning does not arise from base emotional expression itself.
A major obstacle to a credible acceptance of the behaviourist motivational
perspectives is that they themselves believe we need to be more clever with what we
already have (Landy and Becker 1987:3). In other words, that there needs to be a
reconceptualisation of current principles, a reordering of current theories rather than
their superseding with anything more conceptually relevant to those individuals they
relate to. For example, motivation theory could not explain the attitudes, states of mind
and perceptions of self, Fucini and Fucini (1990) found in the new Mazda car plant in
Detroit (USA). Here employees perceptions of the organisation, prior to and immediately
after entry, were favourably affected by the self-imagining of the organisation as
paternalistic parent of their needs. However, in order to meet the
requirements of setting up the organisation, individuals were pressurised into accepting
working practices alien to those they had agreed to endure for the company, especially in
this tense period leading up to full car production. This led to grievances arising out of
the alleged intransigence of the Japanese management towards the situation facing
employees. Individuals thus began to lose the initial spirit of adventure
engendered by working for a leading Japanese car manufacturer, due no doubt, to their
reasons for working hard, their self, being tested to the limit. As a consequence of this,
employees were involved in a number of protests, among them walking to the
doors in order to gain adequate ventilation. It was these perceptions of how their
self was seen in the organisation that led to such actions. In other words, their meanings
and reasons for working had been brought into question. These actions belonged less to
individual intransigence - i.e. an unwillingness to work or indeed a lack of motivation or
work ethic per se (see Rose 1991) - and more to the power positional struggles workers
were faced with in terms of their identities, what they were allowed to do, and the
consequences of this for how they viewed their sense of self.
Motivation theory however, does not view those employees they analyse as sentient,
reflexive beings, but as units of stimulus-response. Thus they fail to come to terms with
the object of their study - human beings and the complex nature of their socially
constructed lives or lifeworlds (Habermas 1981). The concept of
lifeworld refers to the belief that people are born into a symbolic world of
meanings that are repaired, elaborated, changed and integrated through communication and
the negotiation of action, which are undertaken constantly in ordinary social interaction.
Prediction is here marginalised to sophistry. Partly through these processes of
socialisation, a lifeworld is internalised that allows people to interpret
meanings in a reliable fashion and learn conformity to social norms. This enables them to
inter-act with others in a way that reciprocates and secures identity and thus replicates
response. This then provides an ontological security, in which the organisation is not
necessarily implicated.
Once within the confines of an organisation, individuals become open to the organisational
aura, or the set of norms structuring action therein. Clarke and Wilson (1961)
proposed that the moral involvement this engendered compensated for a lack of material
incentives, and encompassed the socialisation into using company products as a way of
seeing its public identity as their own. This is the case of an organisational self where
individuals use corporate pens, mugs, or buy T-shirts or use organisational services. This
has deep consequences for the self and for the action oriented meanings employees impute
to their daily tasks. However, individuals do not respond to these as automatons. They are
fluid in negotiation as part of the social construction of an individuals reality
within an organisation. As such individuals are constantly acting up against the buffers
of acceptable conduct, constantly pushing the definitions of action further than before.
At the same time they touch barriers to free action - other individuals definitions
of the situation - and re-negotiate their own and others positions in light of this before
the dance begins again. Before outlining Shamirs idea of the
self-concept and its more human centred approach towards people at work, a few
cautions are required concerning those it is more likely to supplement than surpass.
SELF-IDENTITY : INFLUENCE AND PERSUASION.
The theory proposed by Shamir (1990) is one attempt to bridge the gap between the
individual as social and the individual as object of experiment. The intention is to
relate work to those that enact its vestiges and its vagaries. If this is engineering in
any sense, it is not of the social but of the concrete practices of work which
have been at the centre of controversy for over 70 years; see for example the Hawthorne
Studies (Lilja and Grieco 1989; Jones 1992).
The Bias of Individual.
The first and perhaps most well defined problem is the individualistic bias and the
principle of hedonism in which most theories of motivation have their roots, to a greater
or lesser extent The individual is seen as rational maximiser of personal utility - a very
neo-classical position - which regards the individual as only having self-seeking
instrumentality. Allied with this throughout the 1980s were implicit notions of the
entrepreneurial spirit as latent instinct in us all (cf. Burrows and Curran 1991). Hence
the social creation of the yuppie.2 Such
motivation theory emphasises the unavoidable susceptibility of individuals towards
maintaining the sanctity of their own person at the expense of others, no matter how
irrational that might appear; for example, personal survival within the firm and the
differentiation between employees (Dubinsky and Hartley 1986). Although need theories
differ here from the rest, they do so only slightly in that they emphasise
expressive individualism which remains aligned with notions of individual
satisfaction. The contrasting experience is of course particular Japanese organisations
and their collectivist notion of commitment, stressing attachment to the organisation and
achievement of organisational goals as personal goals - a more unitrist perspective. This
however has its own attendant problems for analysis of the individual within the
organisation. Here individuals notions of the social basis of their self is
unavailable to those members of the largest organisations practising commitment oriented
policies (cf. Briggs 1988; Garrahan 1988). This is due in part to the necessary sense of
duty from members, professing chronological loyalty to the organisation before others.
Although such a perspective also has its inherent contradictions and problems, it
highlights the possibility of a cultural bias that affects these western models which
claim to analyse motivation per se. Hence they appear culturally specific and
therefore lacking in an ability to extrapolate and encompass their societies, or other
conceptions of the reasons behind expending effort at work. In other words they lack any
insight into motivation at all, merely articulating the vagaries of the choosing of
individual variables to express the reasons for acting of people in the work situation.
Moreover, this is only part of the problem; many work-related phenomena are rendered
inexplicable in current theories of motivation through an over emphasis upon utilitarian
individualism. For example, transformational or charismatic leadership (Bass
1985; Pauchant 1991; Weber 1976) cannot be explained by individualistic utilitarian
motivation theories; since their ability to explain how followers are persuaded to
transcend personal self-interest for the team, other collective good or the organisation,
is severely limited, relying as they do on notions of greed and sectionalism.3
Consider this passage from Hopfls (1992:23) paper on charismatic leadership and the
use of mission statements, induction and imaging to incorporate individual members under
the organisational self. The entrance of the leader is intended to place the audience at a
disadvantage and to create within them a sense of awe and mystification, but is more
precisely intended to persuade them to action in a different way to that of simple
motivation. It proposes to provide them with a sense of self that will motivate them to
action as a sense of duty as one, not as individuals:
He is not handsome but, at the same time, he is not unattractive. His clothes are expensive and conservative: they make a statement. The man stands before them, examines his manicured nails and then ... scrutinises the ménage ... gathered to hear him. The audience shifts warily in their seats. Mentally they come to attention.
Such unashamed imagery, as opposed to content at this point of the presentation, belies
the message this leader is attempting to impart - which is that individualism
(despite the leader exhibiting this) is relegated to any competitors they might have, and
that the person standing before them has the power to help them achieve, but only
together, for the good of the organisation. The use of mission statements and induction
are on the increase in the UK and have been prevalent in the USA for some time. Yet, they
figure very little if at all, in the theories of motivational theorists. This is made
apparent in the passage from Hopfl below. It is forwarded by a quotation from a chairman's
speech at an extraordinary organisation wide meeting, gathered by the author in the course
of a study he is conducting:
What we are about to hear is [the sursum corda] how much the company loves ... and needs these poor unworthy servants; how if they will only give their heart, soul and mind to the company, they can take their place with the chosen ones, the elect. (Hopfl 1992:23)
This company has been the company in this area for a long
time, weve maintained that through you, yes, through you, each and every one of you
has given this company the best of your abilities - we are proud of that. The future holds
a new challenge. This organisation cant make it alone, it needs you, I need you, we
need each other. It is only together that we will see a new decade arrive as a prosperous
company and we must stick together to make it happen.
When seen in conjunction with recent attempts to adopt organisational structures
encouraging homogeneity and unity within employees (Clegg 1990), this becomes an all too
real scenario. Such acts occurred at ICI (Pettigrew 1985) and at Rover with
Sir Graham Day.4 It is even occurring, though less
theatrically perhaps, within institutions of higher education. Theories of motivation,
would be hard pressed to account for these situations and the differing perceptions the
audience might make in terms of individual understanding. The emphasis they place on
utilitarianism as a force for action ignores the meanings generated by receiving
individuals as they interact with each other in light of such iconoclastic coda of
collectivism (Golden 1992).
The Bias of Situation.
Motivational theories hold important the specific goals and clear expectations
which enable rewards to be linked to performance from individuals. Fundamentally this
illustrates a situational bias in current cognitive motivation theory. These
exigencies only become credible in situations where the goals can be clear cut, the
rewards abundant and are able to be closely linked to performance. A circumstance which
belies actual practice in many cases. For example in the public sector where performance
is less well defined or where differentiation among individuals in terms of their
performance has low cultural sanction. However, such conceptions of individuals are
gaining credibility without a hold on any real measure of their performance (cf. Coates
1994).5 Strong situations are characterised by well recognised
rules of conduct and uniform expectations of response patterns that constrain behaviour,
due to their stimulus response reinforcement. Such situations are few and far between in
typical organisational settings, and especially so now that emphasis is being placed upon
new organisational forms by employers themselves. These are removing or attempting to
remove the last vestiges of Taylorite time and motion work task structuring by
which rewards were distributed previously (cf. Hassard and Pym 1990; Thompson and McHugh
1991; Reed 1991).
Traditional motivational management text views production of goods and services as the
factory-type system following a linear logic of sequential, tightly engineered actions or
processes where human beings are viewed as machine parts, even though they do what
machines cannot. Thus the situation is a creation of the authorial actor participating
always, but interacting intermittently. Strong situations also tend to produce uniformity
of behaviour, via the exercise of power and hierarchical ordering of control and status.
Conformity to set rules, which means dispositional variables promulgated by motivation
theory, such as individual motivation, have less relevance for the explanation of
behaviour in such situations anyway. Situations where explicit motivation rules occur
might include the armed forces or other regimented regimes, but rarely would they include
business and work organisations, which are fluid in their negotiation of patterns for
acting.
According to Hosking and Fineman (1991:585), it is "an organisations texture is
thus important for understanding the situational exigencies of a particular
organisation." Cooper and Fox (1990:575) go further and argue that texture is the:
Dynamics of interaction between parts as opposed to the conception of parts as relatively independent sub-systems, an assumption held by the structural-functional point of view
Texture highlights the importance of the social, as opposed to structural interaction
for the efficient functioning of the organisation and places creation powers in
individuals hands. Within the organisations environment priority must be given
to the tacit and not so tacit nuances of interaction. Goldens (1992) example of the
tacit nuances of the ways in which management passes its message across to employees,
stands testament to the subtle interplay of gestures and impression management - a micro
level analysis (Goffman 1959), rather than the macro organisational level. Thus there are
many ways in which human action can be understood. It is important that analysis focus on
those acts which are not made explicit in the structural formulations of roles within
organisations, and towards those that are negotiated and re-negotiated as part of a
constant interaction process with implications for the larger structural constraints that
organisations face (Mills and Murgatroyd 1991). Motivation theorists do not address these
issues. For them individuals do not in any way influence the social reality they exist
within. Hence criticism needs to focus here, highlighting the tendency of traditional
motivational management text to encounter the problem of et cetera (Garfinkel
and Sacks 1970). Such text is formulated to constrain the et cetera of what takes place
within organisations and as such glosses over the minutiae of interaction of the
organisation. Organisations are traditionally seen as part of the natural order of the
social world, as out there pre-existing our discovery of them, but it is the
connectedness in action - time and space - and not the positivist abstract
ideal, that becomes the simulacrum of the human process of organising. Organisations thus
lose their rational status and appear more as they really are, the improvised and
experimental ideas of human beings coming together and interacting. Therefore it is the
texture bargaining of individuals - socially negotiating their realities through language,
drama, rituals and so forth - that is emblematic of the organisations physical
shape. It is this texture that provides the structure of rules within which
the organisation is enacted. As such it is naïve to view organisational structures as
solid firm objects in which analysis can predict outcomes of human action.
For motivation theory, situational attributes are also unquestionable, but an
organisational climate is created, through social interaction, from
situational attributes in the texture of the very way the organisation creates its rules
and actions for functioning. Thus those structures that form the shell of the organisation
act back, ad libitum, upon the very actors that enable its functioning.
Actors make their social contexts through evaluative descriptions. Social order is not a
given, rather actors choose, construct and negotiate order in and through their
relationships with others. Just as people shape contexts, and thus organisations, contexts
also shape people who become conditioned to accept actions as legitimate depending upon
who they interact with on a long term basis. Therefore organisational climate is generated
by people and contexts; it is not an antecedent of them.
Humans are thus reflexive, knowledgeable agents, conditioned by and at the same time
socially constructing their symbolic environment in terms of their self definition.
Interaction provides the means through which reality is explored and
maintained. Within this actors draw upon a stock of knowledge to aid sense
making, but interactions are also relations of power in which the ability to effect
outcomes, affects the sense making process itself (cf. Clegg 1989). In terms of the
production and reproduction of an organisation this understanding of an interrelationship
between structure and texture shows that an organisational reality is the
accomplished outcome of human agency in search of ontological security
(Giddens 1982). Thus it is an attempt to maintain a notion of self in the flux of social
interaction.
The Bias of Attitude.
More fundamentally, motivational theories deal with attitudinal references, which
erroneously ignore the referents to action that relate to actual physical activity and its
inherent meanings.6 The link between attitudes and
productivity is tenuous at best since those expressing satisfaction/motivation are not
necessarily those putting most effort in. Employees can also be inclined towards work when
they have an easy job that is not particularly strenuous but is either financially or
socially highly rewarding (cf. Burawoy 1979). Focusing on attitudes rather than actions
results, according to Hudson (1991), in making out tactics, where only the
image of what is required is given - actual practice lags behind. This is the manipulation
of the reality which is the negotiation of organisational reality (Goffman 1959). A
central reason for this is that psychometrically tested attitudes are only monocular
attributes of individuals which negate the complexity of behaviour and beliefs involving
multiple actors and the realities of their social - negotiated - experience. People
simultaneously hold many attitudes and experience many complex emotional states. These are
important for work place behaviour. However their effects may be divergent or even
contradictory and cannot be summed up by simple attitude surveys, nor reduced to their
singular meanings alone.
The one epistemological certainty is that meaning, and therefore negotiated social action,
comes from the multitude of sites which we all inhabit in the social world around us. The
interaction of these inter-site negotiations provide the means, meanings and stimulation
to progress in our interactions with others. These are not derived from the single site of
employment as some implicitly assume, nor through notions of job satisfaction and
motivation. The person is in effect an ensemble of social relations which, in turn,
reflect complex structures of social negotiation (Séve 1975). Attitudes thus have a
summary nature, and are conceptually removed from concrete situations, which is the source
of the problem noted above concerning the paucity of links between research and conceptual
ideas.
Furthermore, the conditions necessary for social integration are not to be found solely
within the experience of work - identity and social reality lie partly elsewhere (cf.
Durkheim 1961; Giddens 1971, 1984, 1991; Keat and Urry 1982; Marx 1973). For Gouldner
(1959) the worker brought latent roles to the work place which appertained to
the meanings there imputed; for example those based on gender, age, ethnic origin, etc.,
which they can call upon to interpret the situation. To this end, adequate consideration
of the nature of worker involvement in an organisation will need to venture beyond the
enterprise as its unit of study and simple attitudes that bear little resemblance to
actual motivation. An example taken from Beynon and Blackburns study illustrates
this point:
A packing line is not reducible to its technology. The worker relates to the belt through a particular structure of social relationships in the work situation. [Motivation is not] deducible directly from the technology of mass production. ... [This] ignores the influence of the other factors ... with their distinctive pattern of non-work social characteristics, orientations and attitudes. (1972:156-157)
In contemporary society, the clear majority of individuals are hindered in their
attempts to achieve any form of creative response, due to the controls they
are subject to, and therefore from seeing work as a central life interest (Boyle, Wheale
and Sturgess 1986). In such situations, reasons for acting are seen as an imposition of
forms of working - flexibility and commitment - persuading the employee to adopt symbolic
(material) priorities not elsewhere condoned by their class, social or economic position,
through seeing the organisation as provider with all its paternalistic overtones
(Braverman 1974).
The culturalisation of the work place has thus moved on apace. Workplace relations, as
opposed to attitudes, are not now mediated by material means of production, but have
become questions of discourse and communication between management and employees -
illustrated by quality circles and total quality management briefings (Hill 1991). These,
though, have to be founded upon a grasp of those meanings the individual brings to these
situations.
The Bias of Generalising.
Current motivation theories appear not to address a specific level of action only
generalised attitudes. By so doing they are laying implicit claim to be equally valid for
all categories of behaviour and by implication all attitudes. However, this renders
current theories problematic due to their tendency to emphasise easily observable and
measurable phenomena, leaving actors meanings aside on the grounds that they
represent too subjective a form of data. Thus they leave those relatively discreet
behaviours, actions occurring in the work place, as implausible and at worst non-existent,
individuals accordingly being seen as incapable of expressing them. The micro actions of
individuals are characterised by expressed meanings within the physical sphere.
Goffmans (1959) example of a person touching the brim of their hat when passing
another might be a sign of politeness, but it equally could be signalling awareness of the
recipients immediate deeds (good or bad). Thus there are many ways in which
human action can be understood. It is important, therefore, that for the context of
organising the internal ordering of organisations, we focus on those acts which are (a)
not made explicit in the structural generalised formulations of roles within
organisations, and (b) on those that are negotiated and re-negotiated as part of a
constant interaction process with implications for the larger structural constraints that
organisations face.
The tendency of motivational theory to extrapolate results, naturally leads to a
falsification industry, and leads in the reductionist sense to the problem of validity and
usefulness of theories which seek to explain and predict specific acts without recourse to
the complexity of the situations within which they occur. This arises despite the fact
that the focus of practitioners is simultaneously on a general level, and on the complex
commingled patterns of behaviour, due in part to their necessary proximity to the
interaction. The reliance upon antecedents, as intentions to behave, means certain
theories are judged more valid in spite of their unproven ability to predict macro level
action. In other words, the reductionist takes complex action and reduces it to one
specific act without re-establishing how this affects the original complex action over
time and in differing situations - the spatial and temporal aspects. The conception here
of individuals with selves addresses the distinction between behaviour and experience and
the ways in which the individual gives meaning to the multiplicity of forms of experience
that occur within one individual conscious life. In other words, individuals are unique in
that they encompass both similarity and difference simultaneously, making a generalised
prediction almost anachronistic.
A Bias of Meaning.
Motivation theories also limit conception of intrinsic meanings within work and
the values and moral obligations inherent therein, and in any interaction. Such
conceptions as there are for what motivational theorists call intrinsic motivation (see
Staw 1976), reflect the individualistic hedonistic bias mentioned earlier, especially when
thinking in terms of reward and reinforcements and hence outcomes as
expectancies (Vroom 1964). The task itself is still seen as providing the
satisfaction, the meaning; nowhere is it acknowledged that socially gratifying procedures
may possibly be absent from the task itself, yet performing it may be gratifying due to
the meaning it provides for the individual in terms of affirming their identity or
collective affiliation. Again it is taken for granted that humans are unable to give
meaning to symbols, objects and events which shape their lives, as though they were
disconnected from society and its problems, once inside the organisations
walls. Individuals, though, are able to create meaning through language (Mills 1975) and
through the social construction - agreement - of their definition.7
This exclusion of meanings is also true of personal values and morals brought from outside
of work and of individuals especially. Values do not relate to specific behaviours in a
stimulus-response fashion, but can move freely between objects and actions; that is they
are socially negotiated. Overlooked here is a concept of values as the
desirable - to be sought after, as stimulus to action not object of desire in
an instrumental sense, but as an end in themselves in their social sense. In this
perception the individual seeks the value rather than any reward in the traditional
interpretation.
Without such a perspective on values, it is difficult to account for collective concerns
and moral obligations, as there is little individual reward available. Individuals, then,
use these values in their relationships with others, partly as moral touchstones to rely
on and partly as social capital to bargain with, either released or protected depending
upon the situational exigencies of the time.
ASPECTS OF THE SELF-CONCEPT.
Thus we come to Shamirs (1990) more recent analysis of the self-concept.
Although Shamir has a social psychologists background, his theory of the individual
as a cognizant, thinking being, goes a long way towards bridging the gap between two
disparate fields of inquiry. Human beings are seen not only as goal-orientated in the
social sense, but also as self-expressive; that is action is oriented by simple feelings
as much as by goals. In this perspective people are driven to act by their values and
morals (meanings), garnered through the social interaction of their life space
as distinct from the work space (cf. Habermas 1981). Thus individuals are theorised as
complex entities, with thoughts, realities and beliefs which enhance their conception of
their own and others realities. People are also enlivened to maintain and enhance
their self-esteem and self-worth, that is people have internal desires which they fulfil
by manipulating work. Much of peoples behaviour is regulated and driven by internal
standards of self-evaluative reactions to their own actions, reflected in others through
intercourse. This is partly based upon the distinction individuals carry with them between
their ideal self and ought self (Higgins et al 1987), which are
always closely linked with - limiting - social values and norms specifying desirable
actions in any situation.8 This is also true of peoples
sense of self-consistency, through which they seek to align past, present and future
actions in terms of their self-concept and their self-history. These are in
part composed of identities, locating the self in socially complex, but recognisable
social situations. Individuals are here conceived as active participants in their own
creation, not passive receptors of criteria scripted elsewhere. People derive meaning from
being linked to social collectivities through their identities. Thus in this view
self-concept behaviour is not always related to clear expectations or immediate and
specific goals, nor is it dependant on solid singular situational boundaries, monocular
meanings or individual utilitarianism.
Use of this understanding of people enables a clearer conceptualisation of commitment,
towards work and towards other people. Organisational commitment is typically defined in
terms of identification with the organisation, or attachment of personality symptoms to
organisational systems (Chonko 1989; Kanter 1968). These have often been confounded with
other motivational constructs and outcomes of individuals being committed. Again the
complex social nature of individuals lives, bound up with other institutional
arrangements, is overlooked. Shamir suggests defining the physical exigencies of working
together - organisational commitment - in terms of the salience of the relevant identity
in the individuals self-concept. Work thus becomes less a management defined concept
and turns into a user led reality. This provides a basis for accounting for
individual work efforts that are collectively and socially oriented and not individually
calculative, such as the obedience to transformational leaders. However, this is not
predictable, nor can it be causally linked to any single variable, and so must be studied
sociologically, as it relates to the macro and micro complex commingled lived environment.
The theory also provides a perception of intrinsic motivation - internal meanings spurring
individuals to act in certain ways - that is more closely linked to individuals
meaning and understanding of engineered tasks in terms of their values, identities,
self-perceived attributes and possible selves. For example, assembly line work reduces
motivation due to the detrimental symbolic meaning of this work system for employees
self-concepts and the meanings they hold of themselves and others - not simply as a result
of monotonous task design. Such a social situation arises through the socially constructed
notions of assembly line work, external in the first sense to any organisational reality.
This is then brought into the work setting and interacted upon by those present, in terms
of the extant exigencies they find.
CONCLUSION.
In light of this, it is futile for the work process to look to control employee
motivation, because it is not under its immediate influence. The meanings of
organisations, jobs, products, etc., for workers, lie within workers themselves and
reflect social judgements and values that originate, in part, outside the organisational
system and within the social complexity of lived reality. Managers are perhaps able to
influence these through their role as facilitators in creating shared meanings for actual
work and through their actions as role models, their use of symbols, rituals and language.
But the essence of understanding here is upon creating an organisation that it is
desirable to work for. Not one which can manipulate peoples identities and
self-concepts, but one which provides the environment in which individuals can express and
fulfil these. This to a large extent denies a hierarchical manipulation of those
subordinate to positions of power - which in any event has been maintained through social
agreement and the subtle negotiation of the art of management.
Meaning is thus largely formed outside the sphere of work. This does not negate the
ability of work to cause certain responses in individuals, but argues basic
meanings, response to organisational practices, are set in place long before work is
encountered. Moreover, work is used as an experience to add to identity, providing the
boundaries within which certain activities take place and prescribing how a number of them
are carried out. It does not cause or create the perception of image that individuals have
of themselves prior to entrance, but only add to it.
Despite recent attempts to instigate the organisation as a focus of social identity,
identity is still seen by individuals as represented by the private spheres where they
have a modicum of freedom to choose a course of action, not necessarily predicted
elsewhere (Frith and Goodwin 1990; Willis 1990). The way in which work is experienced
depends neither on work factors nor non-work factors alone, but on the interaction of the
two. One begets the other. The identity expressed at work is derived from the totality of
the individuals experience. While it must be recognised that workers bring ideas and
expectations into work situations it would be churlish to ignore the fact that while they
are there these ideas and expectations have to be related to the ideas and actions of
others, as well as those of supervision and management. For anyone who wants to
understand the nature of the self, the bases of social relations and the limits of
rationality this is paramount (Turner 1983:38).
Identity does not rest on the contingent fact that one group happens to be more powerful
than another, but is inherent in social relations. Within postmodern production relations,
a symbolic system of organisation is produced within social relations of subordination and
dominance. There is little sense in which the re-production of the symbolic system can be
seen as a process in which the dominant and subordinate groups are in equivalent
positions. However this portrays only the macro level exigencies and not the micro order
of everyday life.
Hence it is fluid individual meanings that we must analyse to fathom work place identity.
The modernisation of meaningful life, and its complimentary notion of workers as units of
production in a direct relation to output, has not stifled existence but forced these
meanings to be placed elsewhere than work, which has always been seen to rely on its
rituals (production/employee practices) for good fortune. Furthermore, even within these
new organisational forms emphasis is still upon functional prerequisites for efficiency.
Individuals have gained little real control over the substantive aspects of their work. As
one employee from the authors study argued, echoing many managers, "We are
still numbers, now we are just numbers with names". Pressures to achieve increased
organisational flexibility generate polarisation of producers and directors, rather than
the fabled unitarism. Notions of trust bound up with identity, such as commitment, seem
set to decline rather than rally.
However, post-industrial society has been argued to lead towards consumption displacing
employment as a central life interest. The consumer, it is argued, has become
the projected model citizen, consumption not production will give life meaning and
individuals their identity. At a time when many organisations promulgate strong
organisational consensual cultures to integrate employees towards organisational goals and
values, regardless of social and reward differences; it is important to understand how
such achievement of commitment depends upon employees seeing for themselves how their work
involves real shared - some would say class - interests rather than management insistence
or rhetoric exclusively.
New forms of identity, however, must and will arise out of the seam between the
organisation and the social construction of reality external to work. The inevitability
remains that the process of postmodernisation will dissolve traditional social relations.
While the ritually enforced and sacred social forms secularised from traditional
societies, re-constructed through organisations, have become more subtle and all seeing,
the way has opened through rhetorical example to progressively more conscious interactive
communication, conscious negotiation of action and possible real structural change.
Moreover, this can be aided by the social structural level exploited by the organisational
principle of market forces (capitalism) and its drive for humanisation of
work.
The emphasis here is thus upon the use of sociology as analytic tool to observe the social
relations which are the ingredients to making organisations work. A Weberian bureaucratic
reductionism, where the organisation is the object and individuals its fuel, presents an
increasingly distorted view and is replaced by a perspective which views people as the
catalysts for action within their negotiation of performance for the continued activity of
work. Furthermore, an important point, overlooked throughout study within this area, is
that no matter the conception of individuals within organisations, either as variable
units of manipulation or as individuals with conscious selves negotiating their reality,
the documented outcome is invariably the same. The individual increases effort for more
spiritual rewards, but less relative financial remuneration.
NOTES.
1. See Sievers (1986) for an exposition of the linguistic use of
motivation as a surrogate for meaning within work. It is the way in which
these reasons for acting are manifested in individual realities that is important here.
Eliciting effort from employees within a psychological problematic is based on tapping
these reasons and making them commensurate with those of the organisation (Drennan 1990).
Seldom are individuals considered in relation to the fluidity of the organisational
environment, beyond the extent to which they can be arbitrarily manipulated to increase
productivity (Thompson and McHugh 1990).
2. The discourse of the enterprise culture has been a contingent
rather than a necessary feature of the restructuring of Britain throughout the 1980s, its
discourse has appeared to survive changes of governmental (hegemonic) leaders. What this
discourse has attempted, is the inspiration of individuals towards economic
self interest. The discourse attempted to equate the new enterprise culture with
industriousness, regeneration and real work wealth and happiness. Although
entrepreneurship as a concept is difficult to get hold of, it is a function of
individual, situational and social variables. An example of the enterprise
culture has been management buyouts (Campbell, Bechhofer and McCrone 1992).
Management teams negotiating successful buyouts were seen by some (Wright and Coyne 1985)
as exercising the ultimate right to manage, free from the fetters of an anonymous head
office. As such they were now left to the vagaries of the market and their own ability to
capitalise on enterprising opportunities. In the ironic words of one chairman
(Bannok 1990, quoted in Campbell et al 1992:60):
Management buyouts formed A major element in the UK's Enterprise Revolution of the 1980's. In effect, a new breed of owner-manager was born, and its appearance has been hailed as part of an entrepreneurial revolution.
However, Campbell et al argued from their data that the supposed rights of
ownership applying to mangers in buyout companies are not absolute but are considerably
restricted. Here the belief in the entrepreneur has been thwarted by the inability of
actual situations to live up to the rhetoric.
3. See for example Dickson (1988), who uses IBM as a real example of
charismatic leadership in action.
4. This talk was given to an invited audience at the conservatoire
Birmingham Polytechnic 1991. A summary of this can be found in Current Business Review
1(2):16-21. These practices have figured very strongly in the debate concerning a drift to
postmodernist production methods and the necessary concomitant mutuality these methods
require from employees.
5. Recent work by Bowles and Coates (1992) illustrates that even private
sector organisations find relating productivity to an individuals performance very
difficult indeed - if not impossible.
6. Typically these attempts are captured psychometrically. Categories are
the investigators and culled from other populations or writings. The recording
format is also pre-set. The subject looks on to this
print-and-paper representation and tries to match what they believe with the
questionnaire statements. However, to what extent do the questionnaire statements
represent real beliefs, real values or actual attitudes That is the real question.
7. The mechanism by which people internalise the roles and attitudes of
others, which in turn aid the forming of their own, is language (Mills 1975). Language is
composed of gestures, without which people could not incorporate the understandings and
meanings of others, thus leading to the enactment of self.
8. For an excellent exposition of the socially constructed nature of the
self, see George Herbert Mead (1934).
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