103: Bringing Work Back In - Barley & Kunda - Talking About Organizations Podcast

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Work has slipped increasingly into the background as organizational theory converged on the study of strategies, structures, and environments as its central and defining interests
Barley & Kunda (2001)

In their 2001 Organization Science article “Bringing Work Back In,” Steven Barley and Gideon Kunda lamented how the study of work, its organization, and its performance shifted in the middle of the 20^th century. By then, the classic era of organization studies had lasted almost fifty years, beginning with the works of Frederick Taylor to Peter Blau and others at mid-century. Afterward, the focus shifted to post-bureaucratic concepts such as boundaryless organizations and networks, distributed work, cross-functional teams. That an academic field has shifted is not what concerns Barley and Kunda, rather that these new ideas are not grounded in rigorous studies of how people in such new organizations work. They therefore call for changes in research agendas and a return to emphasis on field work, albeit modified from the classic era to account for new work patterns such as remote work.

At the core of their argument is the critique of the shift away from studying work. The emergence of systems theories that sought grand theoretical models of organizations that could explain most any organizational setting and associated work environment. But with abstraction came a lack of elegance and detachment from situational accounts of what was actually happening. The rise of computing made quantitative methods like surveys popular and cheap, but at the expense of the explanatory power of observation. Also, the increasing specialization of organization studies brought about divisions between sociology and organization theorists, which caused the latter to become dependent on other fields for data rather than pursue its own field studies.

They argued for two things: (1) a return to qualitative fieldwork to study work such as the uses of ethnography and participant-observation rather than interviews, and (2) comparative designs to study comparisons and contrasts of multiple organizations rather than the single-organization studies that were most common at the time.

Much of Barley and Kunda’s critique still resonates in 2023, and is made all the more urgent as a result of the pandemic and transformational changes in work environments that favored many workers. Field work in some of these settings, however, can be very challenging.

Part 1. What happened to the study of work in organization theory?

Part 2. How to bring work back to organization studies

Summary of Episode 103

You may also download the audio files here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Teaser

Read with us:

Barley, S. R., & Kunda, G. (2001). Bringing work back in. Organization science, 12(1), 76-95.

To Learn More:

Barley, S. R. (1996). Technicians in the workplace: Ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organizational studies. Administrative science quarterly, 404-441.

Beckman, C. & Mazmanian, M. (2020). Dreams of the overworked: living, working and parenting in the digital age. Stanford University Press.

Cameron, L. D. & Rahman, H. (2021). Expanding the Locus of Resistance: Understanding the Co-constitution of Control and Resistance in the Gig Economy. Organization science, 33(1), 38-58.

Rahman, H. A., & Valentine, M. A. (2021). How managers maintain control through collaborative repair: Evidence from platform-mediated “gigs”. Organization Science, 32(5), 1300-1326.