INTEGRATION AND REGULATION IN ORGANIZATIONS: A CONTEXTUAL APPROACH.

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]