A Sociological Approach to Organizational Strategy

From Cognitive and Instrumental Rationality to Comprehensibility

Abstract

This paper focuses on organizational strategy and deals with it from the sociological perspective. The concept of organizational strategy first appeared as a military metaphor in organizational studies. Using this concept, organizational studies describe the manner in which organizations rationally compete with each other in the marketplace. However, the metaphor of organizational strategy has spawned its own discipline, and therefore, it is separated from organizational studies.
Since the concept of organizational strategy emphasizes the economic battle between organizations, economics and/or administrative sciences are the dominant perspective employed in these studies. As a result, the sociological perspective has not been employed. Nevertheless, this perspective is vital for analyzing the organizational strategy in contemporary society. Therefore, we must reconsider the concept of organizational strategy.
This paper aims to explore substitutes for this strategy and the following are the two candidates : business ethics and accountability. In this paper, I support the latter candidate and attempt to prove the effectiveness of the analysis by using criterion not in terms of its “rationality” but its “comprehensibility.” To develop this theory, I refer to new ideas such as organizational identity and expressive organization.
The utilization of these ideas will enable us to deconstruct the myth of the organization as a rational system and construct a new myth and theory to analyze organizations in contemporary society.