Modes of ordering

What is the character of organisation? What is the structure of a large laboratory? What is it to manage an organisation? These were the questions that I was trying to answer as I spent time at Daresbury.106

To answer them I needed to cut through the dazzle and Other almost every possibility. This started in the process that I have just described. Fairly quickly, patterns started to emerge from and resonate with the data assembling in my notebooks. The process of Othering, of deletion

– which was also, and in the same moment, the process of pattern- making – was under way. A more tractable reality was being enacted.

But there were two patterns. One, as I have noted, was classical, incremental, evolutionary, and decidedly undramatic. Events in the laboratory had unfolded bit by bit. Certainly there had been problems, but there are always problems in any organisation. And the task, as always, was to solve those problems, treat them as puzzles to be resolved. And indeed they had been solved. The laboratory had moved on. The second pattern was heroic, romantic, and discontinuous. It was about qualitative change. Again as I have noted, this conceived of the history of the laboratory as a dramatic ‘before’ and ‘after’. Before, it was beset with difficulties, on the verge of catastrophic failure. Indeed it was about

to be closed. But then the new management team had been drafted in. The result was a dramatic discontinuity. The problems had been addressed. Things had been put right. A new urgency and dynamism was injected into the organisation. The laboratory was put back on track. Its future was assured. It had been saved.

So there were two histories to choose between or combine: the classical and the romantic. How to do this? How to reduce the dazzle still further? After a while I concluded that neither was correct. Or better, I concluded that they were simplifying stories and that the history of the laboratory was more complex than either. At the same time they were not stupid. Perhaps, then, both were partially right. Or, to put it differently, perhaps the history of the laboratory could be understood as the enactment of both. This suspicion was confirmed when I started to find that these two patterns – I came to call them ‘administration’ and ‘enterprise’ – also repeated and resonated in quite different contexts. They were two quite different styles for decision making that seemed to co-exist, often within the same person. Sometimes they were in conflict. According to administration, enterprise often broke the rules. It was too attached to the main chance. It was a ‘cowboy’ logic. Conversely, from an entrepre- neurial point of view administration frequently looked like ‘civil service’ pen-pushing, more concerned with due process and form-filling than responding to the challenges of the real world. At the same time, often enough they depended on one another (enterprise needed the legalities of due process, while administration depended on the more responsive approach of enterprise).

In due course I came to the view that the organisation of the laboratory was not any single thing. It wasn’t simply entrepreneurial. Neither was it simply administrative. Both of these – I came to call them ‘modes of ordering’ – were being enacted in and enacting the structure of the laboratory. Indeed, in due course I further concluded that there were other modes of ordering too. For instance, there was a pattern of charisma at work with its own specific organisational logic. And also that there was a good deal of Kuhnian-style puzzle solving too. And organisation (a verb rather than a noun) was the enactment of all of these and their different interactions (and a lot more besides). Organisation, then, was multiple. It was multiple patterning, multiple versions of repetition, and multiple modes of Othering.

By now it is clear that everything said by Mol about multiplicity also applies to organisation. But so too do the arguments about allegory. For the managers can be understood as consummate allegorists. They lived, enacted, depicted, in short, they gathered – a series of different and (non-?)coherent realities. Perhaps organisation itself is allegory. It is

gathering. Perhaps it is the creation, recognition and tolerance of different patterns altogether. A process of holding things together that are not strongly consistent. Perhaps, then, good organisational studies are also studies in allegory that depict and manifest realities that achieve allegorical gathering rather than a single-version discursive consistency. Fractionality.

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