Crozier and Friedberg
September 30, 2008
Crozier and Friedberg’s sociology of organized action describes an organization as a network of power relationships acted out through participation in power games.
Crozier and Friedberg
The theoretical model of power relationships in organizations that I like is that of Crozier and Friedberg (1977). Their model of the sociology of organized action is one in which actors in an organization coexist in a network of power relationships and seek to increase their power (meaning their freedom of action, typically) by participating in and winning power games with other the other actors in the organization. For the following, I summarize an analysis by Ducheneaut [Ducheneaut 2002, p. 158-159] of the model proposed by Crozier and Friedberg and its relevance to power games as described by Dutton (1992).
One actor has power over another and is in a power relationship with that other when she has something that the other wants, but has the freedom of action to cause that other to behave in ways they had not intended or wanted in order to get it. Any actor can acquire power. The pair in a power relationship can each have power over the other, depending on the context: power relationships are context specific, and are bi-directional. Crozer and Friedburg also say that power is “non-transitive:” if A has power over B and B over C, then A does not necesarily have power over C.
An organization as a social construct has the goal of promoting cooperation among autonomous actors (its members), each of whom have goals and interests which may be different from those of other actors. The organization makes cooperation among its members possible by inhibiting the negotiating power of the actors and restricting the strategies that are available for them to use in achieving their goals, thus channeling the actors into choosing outcomes conducive to achieving the goals of the organization.
Actors seek to expand their power by participating in power games, where we define a game like so: they are played by sets of two or more actors, have a set of objectives or purposes, provide rules which determine viable moves, and provide prizes or penalties for the winners (which may be separate and different from the objectives) [Dutton 1992, p. 307]. The organizational context provides many interrelated, simultaneous games, and sets the rules, objectives and prizes or penalties for those games. To have power in an organizational sense is to have a greater margin of freedom to act in order to either change the character of the games played or to push areas of uncertainty onto other actors.
Crozier and Friedberg name four ways by which an actor may acquire power: mastery of an important competency; control over information or communications; having an important relationship with the organization’s environment (control over a critical resource, for example); and being able to control organizational rules (perhaps through hierarchical power). Established members of organizations know which actors hold power, the nature of that power (expertise, knowledge, social connections, hierarchy or otherwise), and how to access those actors via their social network. This helps them to be effective in cooperative and competitive games such as knowledge acquisition and sharing because this information informs their choice of strategies.
Note that the structure of a power relationship network may differ from the hierarchical structure of the organization. Although many organizations publish organizational charts which show who reports to whom, and a directory of who is in the organization and what functional unit they work for, the social network defined by power relationships may not be discoverable from this data. “Power is not to be understood in the narrow sense of political or hierarchical power” [Ducheneaut 2002, p. 158].
References
- Crozier, M., & Friedberg, E. (1977). L’acteur et le systeme: Seuil.
- Ducheneaut, N. B. (2002). The Social Impacts of Electronic Mail in Organizations: A case study of electronic power games using communication genres. Information, Communication & Society, 5(2), 153-188.
- Dutton, W. H. (1992). The ecology of games shaping telecommunications. Communication Theory 2 (4), 303-328.
