Organizational Misbehaviour.

Organizational Misbehaviour, by Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. 184 pp.

Given the recent "misbehaviors" in organizations that dominate the headlines--ImClone, Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, to name a few--the title of this book is intriguing. However, this book's subject is not on corporate leaders but rather, the misbehavior by regular employees and the "misreading" by management of the meaning of these varied misbehaviors. Nonetheless, systemic misbehavior by employees creates high organizational costs, and thus the topic is certainly an important one. Organizational Misbehaviour is written by professors of Organizational Analysis (the field known as Organizational Behavior in the United States) at the University of Strathclyde in England, Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson. The inspiration for the book was to respond to several rebuttals the authors received to an article on the subject published in Sociology (Thompson & Ackroyd, 1995).

The book's focus "includes the widest range of behaviour" (p. 1); however, the next paragraph narrows this wide scope by honing in on behaviors of "ordinary employees" (p. 2), or rather, hourly, nonmanagerial employees. One important caveat to note is that the focus of the work is on British labor. Although some of the findings translate to labor in general, certainly not all of them do, as labor in any country is often idiosyncratic as a result of economic, social, and political factors. Specifically, the authors define organizational misbehavior as "anything you do at work you are not supposed to do" (p. 2), a rather vague definition proffered by another researcher (Sprouse, 1992, p. 3). The authors go on to state what they do not mean by their original definition: "managerial misbehaviour, grey fringes of business, whistle-blowing" (p. 3). What misbehaviors the authors do cover by the definition fall into four "dimensions" or categories (p. 25): Appropriation of Time (time wasting, absences, turnover), Appropriation of Work (effort bargaining, soldieting, destructiveness/sabotage), Appropriation of Product (pilferage, fiddling, theft), and Appropriation of Identity (joking rituals, subcultures, sex games, class/ group solidarity). Each of the examples in the categories are placed on a continuum of "Cooperation--Compliance--Withdrawal--Denial/Hostility" (p. 25), with the condition that "misbehaviour is a matter of imposed definition, something decided by the group which has power" (p. 3), or rather, management.

The reader might wonder how certain behaviors described are misbehaviors. For instance, if a time-wasting, often absent employee were to leave an organization, management might want to see more such employees leave, and thus the apparent misbehavior would actually be a desirable behavior. Additionally, to paraphrase the infamous cigar quote attributed to Sigmund Freud, "Sometimes a joke is just a joke." Some jokes can be seen as play and thus positive to an organization rather than as negative acts of "subversion" (p. 114) or "a struggle for the appropriation of identity," by which the authors mean the attempts by employees to take on the roles or appearances of management (p. 100). The authors' behavioral classification scheme is complex, and additional detailed explanation for those readers not familiar with the original debate would have been useful.

With the two-dimensional framework presented, the authors devote a full chapter to each of the four major dimensions of time, work, product, and identity. They also include a brief review of the "evolution of organizational analysis" (p. 15), including Taylorism, the human relations movement, and the schools of Weber and Marx, with explanations as to how each views misbehavior. In short, Taylorism ignored the topic; the human relations movement was naive about it; and Weber-Marx theorists correctly, according to the authors, placed it in terms of resistance and class struggle. Concluding the book is a chapter devoted to the question of whether organizational misbehavior will ever be fully eradicated. The authors contend that misbehavior will be ever present and call those scholars who disagree, and some whose work agrees, with their analysis "inaccurate and misconceived" (p. 144). Such a challenge should cause many researchers to pull out their pens to continue to keep the debate alive.

The book is very ambitious in its audience appeal. The back cover of the book states that it is "essential reading for all students, researchers, and managers of organizational behaviour." However, in trying to be something to everyone, the authors risk being nothing to no one. Organizational Misbehaviour is clearly a scholarly work, with its repeated citations from 350 reference materials. The appeal of the book is oriented more to researchers and scholars or managers looking for research-based analysis. Certainly, those people being rebutted in the book will take particular interest.

However, managers who are looking for experiential or practical applications will find the book less useful. The book's focus is historical rather than contemporary. For example, the authors briefly mention the relationship of organizational misbehavior to a few management techniques--JIT (Just in Time inventory systems) and TQM (Total Quality Management), for example. Both of these techniques have been around for decades, with proven results and a great deal of literature devoted to them. Thus, the authors' dismissive stance of these techniques as just additional "HRM-style regimes" (p. 155) with no empirical support is disappointing and suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of these techniques.

Any managerial technique can be used negatively. The problem is that the authors view all managerial techniques as inherently negative without recognizing many positive aspects. Specifically related to TQM, W. Edwards Deming, the most recognized name associated with the subject, was pro-labor. Indeed, Deming stated that the majority, at least 90%, of problems in an organization are the responsibility of top management because only top management has the power to work on the system while other employees only work in the system. Deming realized that the various TQM tools could be used against employees; he also warned that organizations that used the TQM tools to beat up employees rather than help them improve would only have one opportunity to do so--after which subversion to beat the "system" would kick in (Deming, 1986). Many organizations failed at TQM; yet many organizations have prospered greatly due to proper implementation.

JIT, TQM, and similar management initiatives have improved the quality, productivity, and safety of organizations worldwide. And although the authors and some labor representatives may bemoan these initiatives as regimist, these types of initiatives have saved many organizations, which ipso facto, no misbehavior could occur in if they did not exist. In an increasingly global economy, all of these misbehaving employees need to realize that they may well misbehave themselves out of a job and an organization out of existence. There is nothing regimist about that fact; it is just an economic reality that the authors in their across-the-board defense of organizational misbehavior seem to have overlooked. Exploring contemporary issues would have bolstered the authors' premise.

Given the high number of reference works, the book makes some extremely broad statements that could have used more detailed explanations. Two examples: "Paradoxical though it may seem, what organizational behaviour is like in its ordinary forms has not been subjected to considerable analysis and discussion" (p. 9), or "There is now a large amount of authoritative opinion which suggests that the employee has been effectively tamed and subdued; that the battle that managements have waged to secure a degree of conformity from employees, has been decisively resolved in their favor" (p. 144).

The authors are correct that most works, especially textbooks, on organizational theory, organizational analysis, and organizational behavior are more positive than the literature or the reality of organizations suggests. However, there is a body of work that deserves recognition for exploring the dichotomy between the behaviors of management and labor, specifically detailing what the authors call labor's "recalcitrance, resistance and self-organization" (p. 144). For example, Barbara Garson's book first published in the early 1970s, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (1994), is a classic. Drawing on participant-observation and interviews with employees of various types of organizations--from car assembly line workers to tuna fish packers to medical lab workers--Garson details the misbehaviors of labor in an interesting manner that is sure to shock, amuse, and frustrate any manager on a number of managerial issues. Additionally, Gareth Morgan's Images of Organizations (1986) tackles much of the subject in several chapters--including organizations as cultures, organizations as political systems, organizations as psychic prisons, and organizations as instruments of domination. Scholarly in its approach with numerous citations from the academic literature, the Morgan book remains an international best-seller.