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Our research on integration and regulation in organizations is based upon concerns we share about the way organizations adapt or, rather, fail to adapt in our society. We have observed situations in many kinds of organizations where most people are aware that values are not being served, concerns are not being met and issues are not being resolved, but where either no action is taken or, if it is, it fails to achieve desired results. We call these situations social deadlocks and our long-term normative interest is to see whether they can be broken.[1] Although this paper is addressed to methodological aspects of our work, we hope to demonstrate how the design of our research project and the concepts and methods we use are guided by these concerns. Starting with a very brief outline of three of the cases, we then identify a number of common themes and concepts as the key research interests. Some of the problems of pursuing these interests are raised in terms of problems of definition, the collection of evidence and of inference. We argue that attempts to deal with these problems lead us to adopt a particular focus, design and approach for research. The paper then moves to a description of our methods and to some of the problems of analysis and explanation associated with the contextualist style of research we have adopted. Finally, we go back to the cases to demonstrate how our concepts and theories are refined by the research process, which is essentially a dialectic between emergent and imposed frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New forms of information technology, together with recent developments in management theory and practice, have resulted in considerable debate concerning the social and technical implications of the emergent form of computer-dependent virtual organization. This paper identifies and reviews some theoretical developments central to the critical analysis of the use of combined computer-based systems and quality management applications. While the advocates of these trends propose that the emergent organizational configurations provide employees with the opportunity for participation in decision-making, resulting in 'empowerment' and the possibility of personal fulfilment, here it is argued that the virtual organization may result in a progressive formalisation of social relationships which will erode the meaning of true employee participation. It is suggested that the combination of networked computer-based systems and the psychological techniques which underpin the quality management methodologies, do not replace the technologies of control identifiable in the principles of scientific management and Fordism. Instead they provide an enhanced, more insidious form of technical and cultural control designed to engage the acquiescence of employees in order to maintain the efficiency of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the organization theory and social work. The organization theory approach could be a useful form of assessment in the social work sphere. As Eric Hoyle points out, "The Sociological study of organizations has developed from an early concern with efficiency in the business enterprise to a concern with the internal activities of organizations of all types." Hoyle himself uses modern organization theory to examine the role of teachers in the setting of the school. Stephen Cotgrove in a paper to the British Sociological Association described his research at the Regent Polytechnic into the problems of the scientist trying to establish his professional role within the industrial organization. T. Burns and G.M. Stalker have studied certain personnel problems in the two types of organization they term the rational and the organic. These are some British examples of a field of study which has produced in the U.S. a vast volume of work, associated with the names of Merton, Simon, Etzioni, Blau and Talcott Parsons.

In this article, the author explores some dimensions of talk-in-interaction within the context of social/care work team meetings. The author contrasts traditional approaches to analyzing members' stories by illustrating the situated dimension and characteristics of member stories within talk-in-interaction. The use of stories as a means of holding the floor can be heard as a method of responding to difficult questions. Stories may be heard to provide prefaces, which indicate that an extended sequence is being taken up. The demarcation of story sequences into structure and function glosses over the manner through which function and structure are locally occasioned and reflexively constituted phenomena that are mutually elaborative. Stories and narrative sequences, in members' talk, are designed and constructed in situations that may invite overlap, interruption, questioning and disagreement. The multifaceted dimensions and situated social organization of story telling stand in contrast to the generation of functional taxonomies of narrative in members' talk.

The article examines the rhetoric deployed in a large private sector organization alongside its invention of internal markets while highlighting the concept of belonging. Private and public institutions can be thought to create interior spaces where people experience feeling of belonging. There has been a long sociological tradition of associating belonging with the work of managers. The current managerialist cant of getting people to take ownership is a repertoire that abuses affiliation as much as it abbreviates belonging. Markets are taken to demarcate the boundaries between the inside and the outside of an organization. The boundaries between the inside and the outside of an organization are always more complex when some labor is made core and some is left hourly. So flexibility, as a critical success factor, is accomplishing division that further split loyalties. Sociologists of organization have all become accustomed to public institutions being bashed by private institution logic.

It is argued that final reports of contract research firms are best understood as documents embedded in a political economy rather than as objective depictions of reality. That political economy gives rise to distortions of the research process in such reports we conceptualize as 'reconstructive legitimacy'. That concept points to a set of structural conditions which induce contractors to gloss over problems and misrepresent research events. Reconstructive legitimacy functions to convey the image of these for-profit organizations as capable of delivering a viable and useful product to their sponsors. Implications of this manifestly political and economic process for policy research and formulation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review is concerned with a type of research confined mainly (but not exclusively) to researchers working in organisations which produce or maintain large quantities of information as a result of their activities, information which is not labelled as research data but can be used as a basis for research work. Administrative records are easily overlooked as a potential source of data for research, and they present special problems that are not covered in the existing methodological literature produced by academics. But the problems are not unsurmountable, and the result is often research of a type that could not be done by any other means at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on concepts in the analysis of qualitative data. The realm of concepts falls clearly in the latter category. Analysis of the role of concepts in empirical social research remains to a very considerable extent underdeveloped, both a symptom and a cause of the gull which continues to separate sociological theory from socio- logical research. Despite a number of important attempts to bridge the gulf, it is fair to say that in the available literature on how to do research, the awkward problems of the formation and justification of concepts are rapidly passed over to get to more tractable fields like sample design or questionnaire construction. Not that sociologists neglect the analysis of concepts. Concepts in themselves are not theories. They are categories for the organization of ideas and observations. In order to form an explanatory theory, concepts must be interrelated. But concepts do act as a means of storing observations of phenomena which may at a future time be used in a theory. Similarly while concepts are distinct from observations the formation of concepts is a spur to the development of observable indices of the phenomenon subsumed under the concept. Concepts, then, mediate between theory and data.

Sociologist Howard Becker has suggested that in all organizations there are hierarchies of credibility. In very complex organizations where people operating under opposed professional hierarchies interact both formally and informally, the hierarchies of credibility are maintained by the individuals developing situated moralities which allow them to do their best' within the organization concerned. The tension between the demands of the absolute morality of their professional ethic and the situated morality which is shaped by their bounded professional activities, is reduced by the conviction of court and legal personnel that this is what any reasonable man would do in this situation. Aware, however, that their formal rule violations are often visible to other participants; aware, too, that other team members have information essential to furthering their own goals, all participants make alliances with each other, trying to appear as if they are operating under the auspices of their professional ethic, whilst simultaneously managing inter-professional alliances whose very existence demonstrates that they are doing no such thing. Whenever an informal alliance is made between representatives of two teams, at least a double gamble is involved. First, the other teams may perceive the informal alliance to be contrary to their interests and may invoke formal rules to sanction it; in this event parties to the alliance will have queered rather than cleared their pitch. Second, one party to the alliance may, upon receiving further information, himself perceive the alliance to be queering rather than clearing his pitch and thereupon may invoke rules in order to sanction the other party to it.

The aim of this article is to initiate a discussion of the recent series of studies of 'urban social movements'. These studies share a common conceptual framework which is derived from a 'structuralist" reading of Marx and is set out in a preliminary form by Castells in La Question Urbaine.[2] This framework marks a break with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of 'participation' studies, which are characterized by a focus on the individual and his membership of, or participation in, a smaller or greater variety of 'voluntary associations' and other groupings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a study' by a participant observer carried out in 1966 in a new airport in Great Britain. The object was to observe the behavior of the general hands at the airport in relation to the emergence of a social organization. The author worked for a period of twelve weeks as a general hand at a new municipal airport. The old airport serving this particular area had needed replacing and accordingly a new one was planned and developed. The change-over occurred smoothly with the new airport beaconing operational just as the old airport closed down. The system of 'general hands' was a particularly interesting aspect of the new airport's organization. Various methods of municipal airport staffing had been studied by the Airport Director who was responsible for the planning and implementation of a staffing structure. The system adopted meant that the manual workers were organized on the basis that there would be no specific categories of workers; rather that everyone would be utilized in all job categories.

There are an increasing number of sociologists both within organisations and being `produced' by the universities and technical colleges. So far few of them are actually employed as sociologists but it is likely that more will be in the future. This article recognises the existence of structured relationships in groups and in organisations and seeks to bring about change by both diagnosing the structural aspects and using structural means to achieve change. Three strategies for implementing models of planned organisational change are presented. These strategies can be and are used in combination, depending on the change agent's skills and the client's needs. The first strategy is consulting. This refers to the procedure whereby the change agent acts like a psychoanalyst: by articulating the symptoms of the client system he uses himself and the problem to help the client test 'reality'. The discussion of planned organisational change leads to examine a number of problem areas, from which one has selected three.