Tag Archives: Organización

Organization als Verband. A Seminar with Keith Tribe on Weber’s Economy and Society

November 17, 2021 – 1:58 pm

[Sí hay interesad@s por ahí a acceder vía zoom envía un email a José Ossandón]

Organization als Verband. A Seminar with Keith Tribe on Weber’s Economy and Society

Guest: Keith Tribe is a leading authority on Weber, a noted historian of economic and social thought and an accomplished translator of (among others Max Weber, Reinhart Koselleck, and Wihelm Hennis). He recently translated Max Weber Economy and Society.

Program: Introduction by the organizers. Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth & José Ossandón, Department of Organization. Talk by Keith Tribe 30-40 minutes. Discussion

Description: The publication of a new English translation of Max Weber’s Economy and Society (Harvard University Press 2019) is the perfect opportunity to re-assess the impact of Weber on organization studies. Of course, as every organization theory textbook explains, Weber has a secured place in the cannon as the main figure behind the classical theory of bureaucracy. This seminar will focus on a different and less explored issue. As Keith Tribe explains in his translator’s introduction, a key but often unnoticed concept in Economy and Society is the notion of Verband which translates as organization.

Verband is more general than what we normally expect with the term organization. Bureaucracy and the modern capitalist firm are instances of this more general category. It is also, however, much more specific than, for instance, notions like “organizing” or even “institution”. Organization [Verband] refers to social relationships where “the observance of its order is guaranteed by the behavior of particular persons specifically charged with its implementation, such as a director and, quite possible, of an administrative staff” (Weber 2019: 129). Economy and Society provides a conceptual apparatus for a deeply comparative study of organization, that, does not need to get lost in more general sociological processes.

Some of the issues we expect to discuss in this seminar are: what is Verband and what is the status of this concept in Weber’s work? and, more speculatively, how would organization studies be if they were Studies of Verband?

Time and Date: November 18th 2021, 15.00 – 16.30

Location: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg Room: KL 3.54
And on Zoom

Format: Hybrid. Keith Tribe will participate via Zoom, Thomas & José will be in the meeting room KL 3.54

By joseossandon | Posted in Noticias, conferencias y llamados | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

The concept of market (Part 3)

December 14, 2017 – 4:22 pm

[El nombre de esta sección es “artículos en cuotas”. La idea es, como en una novela por entregas, ir subiendo partes de papers a medida que vayan saliendo. El texto abajo es un borrador de un artículo en el que trabajo. Presenté la primera versión en EGOS este año y esto que estoy subiendo acá es una segunda versión, pero aun, borrador y sin edición del inglés. Además de la introducción, el artículo se compondrá de cuatro secciones. Cada parte será una entrega que iré subiendo a medida que tenga las nuevas versiones listas. El texto abajo es la tercera entrega. Como siempre, sugerencias son muy bienvenidas]

The concept of Market (Part 3): Conceptual stances after the concept of organization

(Part 1 available here, and Part 2 here)

draft 14/12/2017

Sociologist of Czech origin, Egon Bittner published in 1965 a paper titled ‘The Concept of Organization’. The article problematized some of the challenges notions like ‘formal and rational organization’ pose to the researchers that use them.

In Bittner’s words:

‘the sociologist finds himself [sic] in the position of having borrowed a concept from those he seeks to study in order to describe what he observes about them’ (Bittner 2013 [1965]; p.176).

Concepts like formal and rational organization are used by researchers, like sociologists and experts in management, and are used also by practitioners involved in the everyday practice of organizing, such as managers and consultants. Researchers, Bittner explains, have so far followed two strategies to deal with this situation. Often times, they ‘proceed to investigate formal organization while assuming that the unexplicated common-sense meanings of the terms are adequate definitions’ (Bittner 2013 [1965]; p.180). Notions like formal and rational organization are taken as terms that are understood by those who use them and therefore do not need a more specific treatment. Other times, researchers take an almost opposite path. They provide technical definitions for terms such as organization that might well contradict the meaning given to these notions in their ordinary usage. In this latter case, ‘interest in the actor’s perspective is either deliberately abandoned, or some fictitious version of it is adopted’ (Bittner 2013 [1965]; p.176). The two strategies, Bittner suggests, are unsatisfactory. In his view, social researchers cannot simply ignore the fact that notions like formal and rational organization are part of their object of inquiry; these are ‘schemes of interpretation that competent and entitled users can invoke in yet unknown ways whenever it suits their purposes’ (Bittner 2013 [1965]; p.182). Accordingly, researchers should develop analytical strategies to study how actors skillfully use and deploy these terms in their practices. For instance: they could study how different activities are deemed irrational and which ones are tolerated or how actors invoke different meanings of a similar concept in different situations.

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By joseossandon | Posted in Artículo en cuotas | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)