Fear of the formal

Over recent decades, ‘formal’ organisations have come in for severe criticism. From the private to the public sector, and across a whole spectrum of actors spanning practitioners as well as academics, formal organisation is viewed with increasing doubt and scepticism. In a ‘Schumpetarian world’ (Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997, p. 509) of dynamic competition and incessant reform, formal organisation appears increasingly anachronistic. Indeed, formal organisation, and its closely-related semantic twin, bureaucracy, are not only represented as ill-suited to the realities of the contemporary organisational world, but as a key source from which organisational dysfunctions themselves emerge.

For that very reason, critics, reformers, and management gurus alike have urged public and private sector organisations to break out of the stifling straightjacket of formality, to dispense with bureaucracy, and to tear down hierarchies. For instance, under the headline ‘Gov 2.0’ the function of government has been ‘reimagined’ as a platform around which creative citizens collaborate (O’Reilly, 2009). Similarly, adopting a whole new mindset where an organisation-centric view of the world is replaced by a more democratic, co-creative, ecosystem-approach is also imagined as an appropriate way of dispensing with costly hierarchies and rigid formalities (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004a, 2004b). Alternatively, the negativities associated with formal organisation are to be countered by creating carnivalesque ‘bonkers organisations’ with ‘zanies in charge’ (Peters, 1992), by ‘firing all the managers’ (Hamel, 2011) or by simply ‘organizing without organisations’ (Shirky, 2008). Although the solutions proffered are quite diverse, they are nevertheless built around a common narrative. On the one hand, we have the recent past with its rigid organisations, managed through formal structures, and supported by theories and principles coined before the middle of the twentieth century. On the other hand, we have the present or immediate future, producing radical new conditions and challenges that cannot be adequately met by relying upon structures and principles inherited from the past. In our present, it is claimed, complexity rules, everything changes and organisational arrangements therefore need to be supple, adaptive and permanently fluctuating.

In such a world, ‘formal organisation’ appears old-fashioned and out of tune with the revolutionary demands of the present. Thus, ‘formal’, understood as something done ‘or made with the forms recognised as ensuring validity’ (OED, online), comes to appear hopelessly outdated, inflexible and restrictive when the world is constantly on the move. For that reason informal and spontaneous modes of organising have emerged, or better re-emerged, as preferable substitutes, because they, in contrast to the formal, allegedly, allow for creativity, inventiveness, flexibility, speed, and freedom. Whereas ‘informal’ signals something ‘[n]ot done or made according to a recognised or prescribed form’; something ‘not observing established procedures or rules’; ‘spontaneous’, in a closely related manner, signals actions ‘[a]rising or proceeding entirely from natural impulse, without any external stimulus or constraint’ (OED Online). Thus, the province of the formal is significantly devalued. Formality is, at best, a signifier of empty, superficial protocols and gestures, and thus something to be shunned. For that reason, it is appropriate perhaps to speak of an increasing ‘fear of the formal’.

While the trajectory through which the formal has come to be eclipsed by the informal and spontaneous is particularly noticeable within management and organisation studies, the problematisation of formal organisation is nevertheless tied in with a much larger turn within the social sciences at large. Thus, across a broad range of disciplines, straddling political theory, sociology, and economics, critiques of formal modes of organising have become ever more prevalent and intense (Stinchcombe, 2001). From Benkler’s (2006) embrace of commons-based peer production via Autonomist Marxists’ celebration of the multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2004; Lazzarato, 2004), to Hayek’s (1974) praise of spontaneous, self-organising systems, formal organisations are negatively coded. And while the various ills associated with formal organisation include repression of the individual, lack of freedom, inefficient allocation, inflexibility, wastefulness, slowness, and suppressed creativity, the cures to these ills are invariably to be found in spontaneous, bottom-up and informal modes of organizing. From cities (Harvey, 2013) to peer-communities (Bruns, 2009), from societies (Tvede, 2015) to governments (O’Reilly, 2009), businesses (Hamel, 2009), and economies (Arvidsson, 2008, 2009), spontaneous and informal modes of organising are increasingly positioned as preferable substitutes to formal modes of organisation. Although substantial differences exist as to the exact political, cultural and moral goals which are to be accomplished through this shift, the modus operandi of spontaneous and informal organisation is cherished by commentators from diverse disciplinary formations and with radically different political beliefs.

In this paper, we explore this ‘fear of the formal’, outlining key elements of its genealogy and exploring its contemporary manifestations in relation to recent and ongoing reforms of organisational life in a range of contexts, public and private, governmental and commercial. At the same time, we seek to indicate the continuing constitutive significance of formality and formalisation, both for the securing of organisational purposes and for individual freedom. ‘Informality’ and ‘spontaneity’, we suggest, should not be approached as ‘expressivist’ ideals, by which we mean that the capacities, dispositions and ‘values’ routinely associated with them –disruption, dissonance, improvisation and so forth – have been allotted a moral primacy over and above, and indeed, in basic opposition to, those capacities and dispositions associated with formality and the formal. In other words, we should not confuse formality that is unjust in terms of the standards set for it by management consultants or social theorists, with formality ineffective for the purposes it holds itself to.

The argument proceeds as follows. First, we provide a short genealogy of how the informal and spontaneous have come to eclipse formality as an organizing principle. In so doing, we are particularly attentive to key moments within the history of organisation theory and the sociology of organisations, because ‘formal’ here has undergone a shift of status from being the distinguishing and defining characteristic with which these fields demarcated their object of study and differentiated themselves from the rest of the social sciences, to something that organizing as an activity must dispense with. At the same time, the spontaneous and informal has enjoyed a renewed significance morally and practically, in sharp contrast to its earlier, not entirely unproblematic status. Secondly, having presented this historical account we argue that in spite of all the ills attached to formality within the field of organisational analysis, as elsewhere in the present, there can be no such thing as organisation as a distinctive sort of entity without the presence of formality. In making this point, we have recourse to the work of the chief executive, minister of state, and university pro-chancellor, Wilfred Brown, who rose to prominence in the field of organisational analysis as a result of his involvement in the first major research project undertaken by the Tavistock Institute after the Second World War: the Glacier project. Finally, we conclude by exploring some of the organisational and political effects of the contemporary turn to informality. We suggest that rather than residing in formality, as many critics argue, contemporary organisational pathologies can be traced to the operationalisation of the assumption that formality is a fraud that should be dispensed with.

In the introduction to his book When Formality Works: Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organisations, the organisational sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe (2001, p. 2) observed that whereas formality ‘used to be a central criterion for the differences between “formal organisations” and other kinds of social structures’, it has now ‘become epiphenomenal’. As Stinchcombe indicates, several of the early theorists of organisation explicitly referred not just to organisations, but to formal organisations, in order to demarcate their specific object of study. Indeed, formal was not merely ‘a’, but rather the central criterion with which ‘organisations’ were differentiated from other social phenomena (Barnard, [1938] 1968; Blau, 1968; Blau & Scott, 1963; March & Simon, 1958; Parsons, 1956). Blau and Scott (1963, p. 5), for instance, made this clear when they stated that in ‘contrast to social organisation that emerges whenever men are living together, there are organisations that have been deliberately established for a certain purpose’. Such organisations, Blau and Scott elaborated, ‘have not spontaneously emerged in the course of social interaction’ (1963), but been deliberately constructed with a number of explicit roles, structures and lines of authority in order to achieve specific goals (Blau & Scott, 1963, see also Barnard, 1968, p. 4; Blau, 1968, pp. 297–298; March & Simon, 1958, pp. 1–4). This ‘formal establishment for an explicit purpose’, therefore, is ‘the criterion that distinguishes’ organisation theory ‘from the study of social organisation in general’ (Blau & Scott, 1963, p. 5).

While agreement concerning this matter characterised the self-reflective founding of organisation theory as a distinct ‘semidiscipline’ with a ‘shared language and a shared set of concerns’ (March, 1965, pp. xiv–xv, cf. Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2015), a collection of works emerging from the 1930s had begun to theorise and inquire into the specific characteristics of, and relationships between, formal organisation, on the one hand, and informal and spontaneous organisation, on the other. Notable among these were Chester Barnard’s (1968) The Functions of the Executive, Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson’s ([1939] 2000) Management and the Worker and Elton Mayo’s ([1949] 1975) The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation and ([1933] 2003) The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. While all of these works contained descriptions of formal, informal, and spontaneous organisation, they nevertheless at the same time differed somewhat in their assessments of the respective moral and organisational importance attached to these. Whereas Barnard, as we shall see shortly, ascribed a range of positive normative attributes to formal organisation, Roethlisberger, Dickson and Mayo tended towards a slightly more critical understanding of formal organisation, while simultaneously attaching more weight to informal and spontaneous organisation. After having attended to how the interrelationships between the formal on the one hand, and the informal and spontaneous on the other, played out in the works of Barnard, Roethlisberger, Dickson and Mayo, we shall move on to show how some of the assessments advanced here gave way to an intensified critique of the formal from around 1960.

Barnard, whose influence on later organisation theory is probably unrivalled by any other single person (Perrow, 1986, p. 63; see also March, 1965, p. xii), wrote his major work at a time when it had not yet become commonplace to refer to organisation theory as a separate and distinct area of study. For that reason it was necessary not merely to specify why it was important to study organisations, but also to stipulate their defining characteristics. In so doing, Barnard stated that political theorists and social scientists had not given sufficient attention to what he designated as the ‘principal structural aspect of society itself’, namely formal organisations (Barnard, 1968, p. xxix). This neglect Barnard considered the social-theoretical equivalent of ‘leaving a vital organ out of anatomy’ (Barnard, 1968, p. 3), because formal organisations were ‘omnipresent and inescapable’ (Barnard, 1968, p. 4). Whether they were ‘governments, government departments, churches, universities, labor units’ (p. 4), such organisations performed an abundance of tasks that were central and indispensable to a well-functioning society. Indeed, most of what one would find ‘reliable, foreseeable, and stable’ was accomplished by such organisations (p. 4), and if they did not exist, we would, according to Barnard, be in ‘a state of nearly complete individualism and disorder’ (p. 120).

To correct this theoretical neglect, Barnard therefore set out to theorise formal organisations. As a minimal delineation he defined them as systems ‘of consciously coördinated activities or forces of two or more persons’ (Barnard, 1968, p. 73, italics in original). Besides being conscious and deliberate, formal organisations, according to Barnard, were also defined by their purposive nature. Indeed, for an organisation to come into being, and to continue its existence, it had to have an overall objective, that is, what Barnard called ‘the “purpose” of an organisation’ (1968, p. 86). This purpose, he stated, was not merely implicit and ‘axiomatic’ in the concept of formal organisation (1968, p. 86); a common objective or purpose was also indispensable and of utmost practical importance if an organisation was to remain vital. While not necessarily easily formulated in words, belief in the existence of an overall objective, goal, or purpose, was crucial (Barnard, 1968, pp. 86).¹

In addition to this representation of formal organisations as an indispensable part of any organizing effort, Barnard, also took ‘spontaneous-’ and ‘informal organisation’ into consideration. However, the way in which he did so was clearly from the point of view of formal organisation. This is evident from the fact that the primary sections of his major work where he attended to these matters (1968, p. 102, 114–123), within Part II of The Functions of the Executive, were titled ‘The Theory and Structure of Formal Organisations’. Whereas ‘spontaneous organisation’ implied a common purpose, and, according to Barnard, for instance took place in putting out a fire, that is, ‘when two or more persons simultaneously contribute efforts, without the leadership or initiative of any one of them’ (p. 102), ‘informal organisation’, conversely, excludes joint purpose by definition, and was therefore considered to be a rather ‘structureless’ and ‘shapeless mass’ that ‘probably cannot persist or become extensive without the emergence of formal organisation’ (p. 115, 117). This did not mean that nothing good comes from informal organisation. It only meant that one could not know in advance what the specific outcome of the actions of an informal group, such as, for instance, a mob or a crowd, would be.

Barnard, however, was not alone in taking cognisance of ‘spontaneous’ and ‘informal organisation’. In his discussion of the latter, he referenced, among others, the human-relations theorists Elton Mayo, Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson. Like Barnard, these writers were also preoccupied with the relations between formal organisation on the one hand, and spontaneous and informal organisation on the other. However, in contrast to Barnard, they did not view the interrelationship between these different modes of organisation from the point of view of the formal to the same extent. Rather, in the work of Elton Mayo ([1949] 1975, [1933] 2003) and Roethlisberger and Dickson ([1939] 2000) one finds the seeds of critiques of ‘formal organisation’ that would come to be extended and elaborated by later generations of organisation scholars, just as one finds an increasing appeal to and of the informal and spontaneous.

One of Roethlisberger and Dickson’s major findings was that group behaviour among workers resulted in a spontaneously arising order within the workplace that differed markedly from the formal order. In what was to become the key account of the famous Hawthorne Experiments, Management and the worker, Roethlisberger and Dickson (2000, p. 524) described how the men at the Hawthorne Plant ‘had elaborated, spontaneously and quite unconsciously, an intricate social organisation around their collective beliefs and sentiments’. This spontaneous social organisation showed up as a specific informal organisation, which, according to Roethlisberger and Dickson, ‘exists in every plant’ (2000, 559), and without which ‘formal organisations could not survive for long’ (2000, 562).

The problem pointed to was not merely that organisation scholars hitherto had overlooked the importance and necessity of the delicate spontaneity of the informal organisation; it was also that this organisational reality either had ‘no representation in the formal organisation at all’ or was ‘inadequately represented’ by the formal organisation (2000, 559). As a consequence, schemes, policies, and changes initiated through formal organisational dictates more often than not ended up with consequences that differed markedly from those intended. Whereas Roethlisberger and Dickson’s attempt to remedy this problematic consisted in proposing the establishment of a new function of personnel work (2000, p. 591), Mayo widened the scope of the problem by stating that organisational problems were essentially caught up in a larger metanarrative, where formalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation had created a condition in which the forces through which spontaneous social organisation could arise had been undermined (1975, 2003). To counter this, Mayo proposed, on the one hand, the establishment of organisations as communities that ideally resembled ‘pre-industrial societies’ where ‘the spontaneous corporation of skilled groups’ prevailed (Smith, 1998, p. 231), and, on the other hand, he thought that such communities could only ‘be restored through the creation of administrative elites trained in techniques of social organisation and control’ (Smith, 1998, pp. 237–238). Hence, in contrast to Roethlisberger and Dickson, who readily identified a spontaneous informal organisation arising from workers’ individual beliefs, their upbringing, and their general socialisation, Mayo thought that the conditions for the flourishing of this spontaneous sociality were significantly hampered, and, therefore, needed to be promoted and restored by capable leaders (cf. Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2013, p. 268).

With the human relations theorists ‘the formal’ therefore increasingly began to be associated with various kinds of ills; yet the attempt to theorise all that could not be subsumed under the categories of the formal organisation should not merely be seen as an acknowledgement of its ‘irrepressibility’ but also as an attempt to bring the informal organisation ‘into alignment with the formal parts and purposes of the organisation’ (Grey, 2010, p. 43). On this view the formal and the informal could be seen as in ‘disequilibrium’ or ‘opposition’ to each other, which indicated that there was an equilibrium or balance point that – given the right conceptual lenses and interventions – could be attained.

While Mayo, Roethlisberger and Dickson in this way opened an intellectual horizon within which formal and informal organisation could come to stand in tension, or, more fundamentally, opposition, to one another, the unfolding and accentuation of this conflict accelerated from the 1960s. A number of theorists began to see it as increasingly difficult to overcome the ills of the formal. On the one hand this happened with the flourishing of theories associated with the second branch of the human-relations movement (Perrow, 1986, p. 97); and on the other hand it happened in conjunction with problematisations of the foundations and key concepts that had been central to those who had identified organisation theory’s primary object as formal organisation. In combination, these two lines of attack on formal organisation merged ethical and political critiques with theoretical and conceptual ones. Formal organisation therefore came to be represented not merely as repressive, dangerous, and out of sync with basic human proclivities, but also came to be associated with ill-conceived theoretical justifications that had led the study of organisations down a problematic ‘managerial’ path. We will attend to each of these critiques in turn.

From the 1960s, formal organisation, with its structures, lines of authority, task specialisation, organisation charts, clearly-demarcated roles, and purposive nature came under repeated attacks from a range of psychologically-informed theories of organisation. In conjunction with individuals being given ‘greater freedom and initiative’, ‘a substantial increase in the educational level of the work force’ (Likert, 1961, pp. 1–2), experiments with T-Groups, and, not least, a new psychology centred on the notion of ‘self-actualization’ (Maslow, 1954; Waring, 1991, pp. 134–35), the view of organisations, and of those working in organisations, changed significantly. While Mayo, Roethlisberger and Dickson had viewed workers as largely passive, responsive, ‘irrational’ (Mayo, 2003, pp. 164–166), and, essentially, objects of manipulation (Perrow, 1986, p. 83), several of those associated with the second wave of human relations, such as, for instance, Rensis Likert, Douglas McGregor, and Chris Argyris, emphasised the inherent creative potential slumbering in workers. Given the right conditions, these theorists reasoned, this creative potential would come to flourish. However, in its way stood all those principles hitherto associated with formal organisations. Whether it was called ‘Theory X’ (McGregor, [1960] 2006), ‘task specialization’ or ‘chain of command’ (Argyris, [1957] 1970, pp. 60–61), ‘exploitative authoritative’ organisation (Likert, 1961; Perrow, 1986, p. 100), or something different, the ‘authoritarianism’ of ‘formal power’ was seen as leading ‘to mistrust, conformity, inflexibility, apathy, and a general withdrawal of efficiency’ (Waring, 1991, p. 118).²

One of the clearest and earliest expressions of this accelerating critique of formal organisation was Chris Argyris’s ([1957] 1970) Personality and Organisation. Rather than pointing to how the formal and informal could be in disequilibrium, or at odds with one another, as Mayo, Roethlisberger and Dickson had done, Argyris stated that there was a more important conflict at stake which consisted in a fundamental ‘lack of congruency between the needs of healthy individuals and the demands of the formal organisation’ (Argyris, 1970, p. 233). On the one hand stood the individual with his or her culturally- and historically-shaped needs for self-actualisation, and on the other stood the formal organisation, which, given its inherent dysfunctions, suited ‘immature and even mentally retarded individuals’ rather than sane people (Argyris, 1970, p. 67). Thus, the problem was not bad and ill-conceived formal organisation, that is, something which could be corrected. Rather, it was formal organisation and its principles per se that were to be blamed for all the ills haunting organisational life. Whether it was task specialisation, managerial coordination, authority, or the chain of command, Argyris saw all of these as inherently at odds with the development of healthy and mature individuals, and, therefore, as outdated and harmful organisational principles that ought to be dispensed with.

Given this basic incompatibility between the dictates of the formal organisation and the needs of healthy individuals, those inhabiting formal organisations inevitably found themselves ‘full of pent-up’ tensions (Argyris, 1970, p. 230). To alleviate this, that is, in Argyris’s words, ‘to maintain a minimum level of health’ and to rid themselves of the tensions produced by the formal organisation, individuals by necessity had to resort to their own ‘informal plays’ (Argyris, 1970, p. 229). And the only way they could do this was through informal organisation. The informal organisation therefore came to be considered as the sane individual’s mode of processing and coping with all the ills generated by formal organisation. Most managers, however, were unable to perceive this causation, and consequently diagnosed ‘the informal behavior as “bad.” Basing their action on the logic of formal organisation, they try to neutralise or do away with the informal behaviour through directive leadership, management controls, and pseudo human relations programs’ (Argyris, 1970, p. 231). In so doing, Argyris continues, ‘they only tend to “compound the felony” that the formal organisation is committing every minute, every hour of the day, because they tend to increase the employees’ feelings of dependence, submissiveness, and subordination’ (Argyris, 1970, p. 231).

In conjunction with discrediting and even ‘criminalizing’ formal organisation, Argyris attached normative weight to a range of characteristics associated with informal organisation. For instance, in conjunction with reviewing various literatures on organisation and management, he contrasted informal, spontaneous, and emergent leadership with formal authority, also referred to as ‘headship’ and ‘domination’. Quoting extensively from Cecil A. Gibb’s article ‘Leadership’ from the Handbook of social psychology, it became apparent that Argyris thought it was important that informal ‘leadership’ should ‘be distinguished, by definition, from domination or headship’. Whereas formal authority ‘is maintained through’ a ‘dominance relation’, the emergent or informal ‘leader’s authority is spontaneously accorded him by his fellow group members’ (Gibb quoted in Argyris, 1970, pp. 70–71). And whereas the former was entirely dependent upon a role and a position artificially created in conjunction with the dictates of the formal organisation, the latter’s position, on the contrary, arose as recognition of the leader’s ability to contribute ‘to group goals’ (Argyris, 1970). The spontaneous, emergent and informal leader’s position therefore was viewed as more fair and benign than the autocratic headship and domination associated with formal organisation.

While Argyris’s critique of formal organisation was perhaps the clearest and most pointed, it was, as already mentioned, merely one example among a range of likeminded critiques that emerged in the 1960s to problematise formal organisation, and, in particular, to show how such organisation crushed the preconditions for self-actualisation and individual initiative (e.g. McGregor, [1960] 2006; Whyte, [1956] 2002). In conjunction with these practical, ethical and political critiques, however, another complementary stream of critique of formal organisation was also beginning to be set in motion. Yet instead of starting from the premise of self-actualisation, this critique targeted the very theoretical and conceptual foundations of organisation theory, as it had developed throughout the preceding decades. Of significance here was a questioning and scepticism directed towards ‘formal organisations’ as the proper key object of organisation theory and the sociology of organisation. In a pioneering article from 1968, which was followed by the book The Theory of Organisations in 1970, the organisational sociologist David Silverman stated that the study of organisations had been led down a slippery and unsustainable path by narrowing and restricting its focus to formal organisation. In essence, Silverman argued, organisation scholars had become caught in a ‘systems orthodoxy’ when they ought rather to establish ‘empirically the conceptions of ends and needs held by’ organisation members (Silverman, 1968, p. 223). By utilising notions such as organisations’ ‘purposes’, ‘goals’ and ‘needs’, organisation scholars, according to Silverman, reified organisations, that is, attributed ‘apparently human motivations to inanimate objects’ (Silverman, 1968, p. 223, see also Silverman, [1970] 1987, p. 3); in so doing, they effectively conceived of organisations and their ‘goals’ and ‘needs’ ‘as things which are separate from the definitions and purposes of their members’ (Silverman, 1987, p. 219).

According to Silverman (1968, p. 234), this ‘metaphysical functionalist’ approach to organisations was fundamentally misguided. By taking formal organisations, and their goals and needs, as key objects and conceptual points of departure, Barnard, Blau and Scott, and all the rest of those theorists who had privileged the study of formal organisations, had, allegedly, become blind not merely to the minute, empirically observable details and conflicts traversing organisations, but also demarcated their object of study too sharply from sociology, thereby ‘excluding or, at best, de-emphasizing the type of problem which arises within the structure of the society rather than within the organisation’ (Silverman, 1968, p. 235). Furthermore, in stressing ‘formality’, ‘organisational goals’ and ‘organisational needs’, the ‘systems orthodoxy’ approach, according to Silverman, implicated and favoured a management perspective on organisational problems. Thus, rather than presenting a neutral perspective on organisational matters, ‘systems orthodoxy’ was criticised for privileging and legitimizing the viewpoint of management at the expense of other organisational members. By favouring formal organisations, and their ‘goals’ and ‘needs’, those studying organisations were therefore led to accept management problems and agendas as their own (Silverman, 1968, p. 229) instead of attending to the conflicts and power-plays through which certain actors and groups within organisations were capable of setting the agenda at the expense of less powerful actors and groups. In this sense Silverman’s theoretical critique of formal organisations resonated with Argyris’s critique in that it also emphasised an intimate connection between formal organisation and managerial abuse of power on the one hand, and an individualistic, if not self-actualising, point of departure at the expense of an organisational point of view on the other.³

In the slipstream of these critiques, formal organisations, and the kinds of study privileging formal organisations, were challenged in a hitherto-unprecedented way.

Not only were formal organisations beginning to be viewed with suspicion, but the discipline previously devoted to the study of such organisations, that is, organisation theory itself, was also beginning to be subject to internal critiques for privileging formal organisations as its primary object. We shall end this short genealogy by indicating how in the final decades of the twentieth century, and the first decade of the twenty-first, an intensification of problematisations of the formal occurred that, in various ways, carried the critiques and contestations of formality forward and transformed it from a marginal and oppositional position into a common and widely-diffused standpoint shared among a varied group of exponents. However, since we cannot do justice to the manifold ways in which formal organisation – directly as well as indirectly – has been criticised from the 1970s onwards, we shall restrict ourselves here to highlighting two important trajectories. On the one hand, we will indicate how economic and popular managerial variants of organisational analysis further undermined the theoretical and practical foundations of formal organisations while simultaneously finding cures to these in spontaneous and/or informal modes of organising; on the other, we will point to the way in which exponents within organisational sociology and related critical lines of thought, from a different angle of attack, developed complementary lines of critique. In so doing, we shall stress how the mutual suspicion and critique of formal organisations voiced within these otherwise different theoretical traditions converged in what we have termed a ‘fear of the formal’.

From the 1970s and onwards, several of the critiques of formal organisations voiced by organisation theorists throughout the 1960s were extended by a range of economic theories of organisation broadly referred to as organisational economics (Barney & Ouchi, 1986). While not dismissive of authority and control as such, organisational economists nevertheless erased the frame of reference through which formal organisation had initially been conceived, and in its place put a reductive image of self-interested actors that, whether in or out of organisations, acted in accordance with narrow economic imperatives. Of particular importance in this regard was agency theory, pioneered by a group of economists at Chicago University (notably Eugene Fama, Michael Jensen, and William Meckling). Agency theory brought a whole new conceptual package to organisation theory and, in so doing, replaced previously-dominant tropes and notions with a vocabulary based on economic reasoning (Jensen, 1983; Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Khurana, 2010, pp. 313–326; Perrow, 1986, pp. 224–236). Arguing that organisation theory was ‘still in its infancy’, Jensen (1983, p. 324) proclaimed a ‘revolution in the science of organisations’. Rather than starting from the premise that organisations were distinct entities, where different organisational personas worked together to pursue (one or several) organisational goals, agency theory instead postulated that organisations, in essence, behaved like markets where rational individuals, as in all other walks of life, pursued their self-interests. All organisations, whether public or private, were essentially reducible to ‘legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals’ (Jensen & Meckling, 1976, p. 310). Substantiating this claim, Jensen and Meckling (1976) explained that there

In setting forth these propositions, Jensen and Meckling casually erased several decades of organisational theorizing, and, in the process, furthermore hopelessly confused such central notions as ‘firms’ and ‘corporations’, thereby completely misrepresenting the language and categories of corporate law (Robé, 2011). Although considering control essential for obtaining viable principal-agent relations, agency theorists erased the whole frame of reference through which earlier organisation theory had viewed formal organisation. This was not least due to the fact that the theory on the one hand excluded the possibility of an overall organisational purpose, and on the other hand excluded the reasonableness of the assumption that managers, or any other organisational ‘agent’, acted in the service of the organisation, rather than solely with an eye to maximizing their own economic returns.

If Silverman had conceived of formal organisations, and in particular of such organisations’ needs and goals, as metaphysical reifications that glossed over the real, concrete and contradictory needs and aspirations of different organisational members, agency theorists, from an economic point of view, seemed to make a somewhat complementary point. They also considered formal organisations as ‘fictions’, just as they discarded any overall, substantive organisational purpose (besides maximising shareholder value). Instead, agency theorists started from the proposition that what counted was the self-interest of individuals and the fact that people behave opportunistically.

Whereas it fell outside the scope of Silverman’s account to solve the problems of organisational life, agency theorists could point to the way in which their ‘fictitious contractual entities’ would solve all conflict. By aligning the interests of the agent with the principal, everybody could pursue their own interest in a mutually beneficial manner without subscribing to an overall organisational goal. Thus, through a web of contractual relations, the ‘behaviour’ of the organisation could simply be depicted as similar to the behaviour of the market, that is, a spontaneous process through which conflicting individual interests could be brought into equilibrium. For that reason, it therefore also made no sense to distinguish between organisational identities and individual identities (as Barnard had done in setting forth his theory of formal organisation), because there was no reason to presume anything but opportunistic behaviour. In essence, there were only self-interested individuals pursuing their goals – either in markets or in organisations that ought to resemble markets. In the words of the organisational economist Oliver Williamson, organisations could therefore simply be considered as ‘a continuation of market relations, by other means’ (1991, p. 162, emphasis in original).

While agency theory has been one of the most pervasive (and dangerous) theoretical currents in recent decades (Dobbin & Jung, 2010; Ghoshal, 2005; Perrow, 1986; Styhre, 2015), the market, as well as related modes of spontaneous organisation, has also seeped into other theoretical accounts as a superior and preferable alternative to formal organisation. In particular, from the 1980s onwards a significant number of highly influential, populist management tomes were quick to pick up on the ways in which organisations ought to be reconceived in much more plastic, spontaneous and ephemeral terms than those characterizing formal organisation. Management theorists here discovered and revitalised elements of the vocabulary previously associated with ‘informal organisations’, and articulated several of the key components of this notion within new concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘self-organisation’, ‘internal markets’, ‘ecosystems’, and so forth (e.g. Peters, 1992, 1994; Peters & Waterman, 1982; Ramaswamy & Gouillart, 2010; Schein, 1992; Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers, 1996). As a complement to the cool, scientistic vocabulary of the agency theorist, management thinkers, in a more seductive and passionate prose, urged practising executives to disregard and overturn formality as an organisational ideal.

Tom Peters, for instance, has argued that it was necessary to ‘get rid of the entire formal organisation’ (1994, pp. 29–30), to ‘destroy the hierarchy’ (1992, p. 131), and to give the market ‘free rein, inside and outside the firm’ (1992, p. 480). In Peters’ ideal, spontaneous, market-like, anti-formal organisation ‘constant informal chatter goes on’ (1994, p. 179), all organisation members are given ‘latitude to perform spontaneous acts’ (1994, p. 266), and to assume they have ‘absolute authority until somebody tells’ them otherwise (Perle, quoted in Peters, 1994, p. 110). Instead of being ‘boxed in’, managers across public and private organisations were called upon to become revolutionary renegades who tore down hierarchies and overturned established lines of coordination, authority, and control. Thus, the prevailing credo seemed to be, ‘We don’t care about formalities’ (Kolind, quoted in Peters, 1994, pp. 29–30).

This anti-formal vocabulary has since then become a common ingredient in the contemporary prevailing management idiom (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). It is therefore unsurprising that Gary Hamel, another of the world’s most influential business thinkers (Kneale, 2009), concurs with Peters when he states that the ‘formal hierarchy overweights experience’, ‘misallocates power’ and ‘breeds sycophants’ (Hamel, 2014). In Hamel’s anti-formal prose, tellingly presented in an article called ‘Bureaucracy must die’, it is stated that if ‘an organisation is going to outrun the future, individuals need the freedom to bend the rules, take risks, go around channels ( … ) and pursue their passions’ (2014). However, rather than stressing ‘the market’ as the ‘model coordination device’ through which this is to be achieved, Hamel, in a cluster of books and articles on ‘management innovation’ (see, e.g. Hamel, 2006, 2009; Hamel & Breen, 2007), argues for the radical potential to be gained from harnessing the spontaneous modes of organizing found in open-source communities. In contrast to dysfunctional formal organisations, Hamel envisages that adoption of the ‘evolving creative anarchy’ characterizing open source communities will allow organisations to become ‘fit for the future’ (Hamel, 2009, p. 5).

In setting out such propositions, Hamel is in agreement with a huge portion of the business literature that has recently discovered how businesses can gain access to hitherto-unimaginable sources of creativity and innovation by utilising informal and spontaneous modes of organizing. The prevailing wisdom on this matter seems to be that businesses at the very least need to establish relations with users, user-communities, social movements, and other extra-organisational capacities, and, more often than not, also emulate their informal, spontaneous modes of organizing in an attempt to become creative and innovative (e.g. Helm & Jones, 2010; von Hippel, 1986, 2006; Normann & Ramírez, 1993; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c; Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2010; see also Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2013).

Thus, in key texts within the pro-business literature we see a strong anti-formal stance being promoted in conjunction with a conceptual celebration of various informal and spontaneous modes of organizing. Whether this agenda is pursued through attempts at depicting organisations in the image of market-like relations (e.g. Jensen & Meckling, 1976; Peters, 1992, 1994), open source communities (e.g. Hamel, 2009; Hamel & Breen, 2007), ‘ecosystems’ (e.g. Ramaswamy & Gouillart, 2010), or something similar, the province of the formal is significantly devalued.

As already indicated, however, this ‘fear of the formal’ has also made its presence felt within organisational sociology and related critical lines of thought that have traditionally been less concerned with – if not directly opposed to – the tightknit connections between markets and contemporary management thought. Some of the roots of this critique go back to the wave of perspectives that began to proliferate within organisational sociology from the 1970s. Those approaches, including, not least, resource-dependence theory and institutional theory, had clear affinities with a ‘view of organisations as ( … ) serving the interests of some people more than others ( … ), and as being built upon and sustaining power relations’ (Donaldson, 1995, p. 15). Rather than being preoccupied with how to develop and sustain appropriate formal organisation, resource-dependence theory and institutional theory instead shifted their respective concerns towards ‘attention and information manipulation’ on the one hand, and ‘the demands and expectations of the wider institutional environment’ on the other (Donaldson, 1995, p. 16). Due to this, institutional theory, for instance, could depict formal organisation as a ‘rational myth’ that merely served as a tool to gain legitimacy, rather than supporting the coordination of the actual work performed by the organisations’ members (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). This ‘decoupling’, as institutional theorists called it (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), was part and parcel of a more profound theoretical reworking and problematisation of formal organisation. Thus, in addition to resource-based theory and institutional theory, a range of anti-formal theoretical currents began to proliferate – from critiques that revolved around ‘the ideology of form’ and linked organisation theory to ‘a tyranny without a tyrant’ (Schuman, 1978, p. 69), to critiques that problematised ‘the ethic of organisation’ for its incapacity to integrate the whole individual (Denhardt, 1981).

Of particular importance, however, was Burrell and Morgan’s Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. It not merely picked up on Silverman’s critique of the ‘metaphysical functionalism’ associated with the study of formal organisation, but also provided new philosophical and social-scientific points of departure for those critical of the primacy hitherto attached to formal organisation as the principal concept and object of organisation theory. Building on Kuhn (1970) notion of paradigms, Burrell and Morgan stated that all organisational theories explicitly or, more often than not, implicitly carried with them ontological and epistemological assumptions that, when disclosed, could be used to classify these theories in accordance with incommensurable traditions of thought. Rather than understanding distinct organisational theories in close association with practical problems, or with what has later come to be designated as a ‘practical stance’ (du Gay & Vikkelsø, 2014, pp. 737–38), Burrell and Morgan emphasised that ‘all theories of organisation are founded upon a philosophy of science and a theory of society’ ([1979] 2014, p. 119). On this premise it then became possible to abstract from the concerns of specific theories, and to outline four overall sociological paradigms to which four distinct modes of organisational theorizing could be linked.⁴ In accordance with their Kuhnian inspiration, Burrell and Morgan stated that they did not ‘attempt to criticise and evaluate’ any of the paradigms from an outside perspective ([1979] 2014, p. xii). Nevertheless, ‘functionalist organisation theory’, that is, the majority of the established tradition of organisational theorizing, was portrayed as ‘ideological’ and ‘conservative’, as well as having a ‘managerial bias’ ‘built into’ its ‘model’ (p. 220). As such, it was also presented as a hindrance to the flourishing of alternative modes of organisational theorizing that, though less developed, were just as legitimate as the functionalist approach. In this sense, the book offered itself as laying the groundwork, as brushing away all contingent matters, and digging down to what was considered of overall importance, that is, to ‘the first principles’ and ‘the philosophical traditions’ from which the respective organisational theories derived (p. 397). And rather than seeking integration, synthesis, and mediation, their fear of having the respective alternative paradigms subsumed under the functionalist orthodoxy led Burrell and Morgan to advocate ‘paradigm isolationism’ ([1979] 2014).

Interestingly, however, none of the three alternative ‘non-functionalist’ modes of organisational theorizing gave much weight to organisations in their own right, and even less to formal organisation. This was due to the fact that organisations either were considered to have a weak ontological status, and/or were depicted as derivatives or epiphenomena of more foundational and encompassing societal structures and totalities. Burrell and Morgan argue that from ‘the standpoint of the interpretative paradigm, organisations simply do not exist’ (p. 260), while from the standpoint of ‘anti-organisation theory’ organisations are viewed as ‘reified social constructs’ and ‘alienating “intermediaries” which serve to mystify human beings in their attempt to comprehend and appreciate the nature of the totality in which they live’ (p. 311). Finally, from the perspective of ‘radical organisation theory’, organisations ‘can only be understood in terms ( … ) of the wider social formation within which they exist and which they reflect’ (Burrell & Morgan, [1979] 2014, p. 368). For this reason, Burrell and Morgan argue, a ‘theory of organisations consonant with radical structuralism would involve not so much the development of a radical theory of organisations as such, as a radical theory of society in which organisations are accorded a central role’ (p. 390).

Due to this, the central status previously accorded to formal organisations could not, and should not, be carried over into any of the three alternative perspectives. If anything, the task for proponents of ‘radical separatism’, as Burrell and Morgan’s approached was dubbed, was to break out of the ‘psychic prison’ (Morgen, 1986) of formal organisations, because, as ‘the prison metaphor suggests’, the ‘“formal” organisation is a disciplined space, with the term “formal” being an imperative that privileges order’ (Hassard, Kelemen, & Cox, 2008, pp. 31–32). A sustained impulse in alternative and critical accounts of organisational theorizing since Burrell and Morgan’s book has consisted in highly-sophisticated theoretical attempts at moving beyond the confines of ‘the prison’ of ‘the formal’. And while the specific attempts at this have been assembled under various normative ideals, several of these experiments have been conducted in the name of giving voice to ‘otherness’, ‘resistance’, the ‘irreducible excess’ of organisational life, ‘processes’, ‘disorganisation’, and all the rest of what is allegedly repressed by categories associated with the formal. Although this has been a huge theoretical success, measured by numbers of conferences organised, journals established, and articles published, scholars implicated in the critical enterprise have begun questioning whether the acrobatic epistemological and ontological manoeuvres concerned have had the benign effects initially hoped for (e.g. Alvesson, 2013; Jackson & Carter, 2009).

Our contention here would be that much of organisational sociology and critical organisational theorizing have been no less implicated in undermining formal organisation than have organisational economics and popular management theorists. Both of these groups have – in their respective ways – attempted to overturn the principles and categories associated with formal organisation, and in their place, often with reference to ideals of freedom, liberation and resistance, they have promoted notions that accord with ideas of ‘spontaneity’, ‘disorganisation’, ‘informality’, ‘excess’, ‘fluidity’ and so forth. If there is a difference between them, it is perhaps less in the respective concepts and philosophical underpinnings supporting their respective gestures, but rather that whereas the critical organisation scholars have to a significant extent failed in their good-hearted attempts (Jackson & Carter, 2009), agency theorists and popular management scholars have, unfortunately, been more successful in shaping organisations in their own image (Dobbin & Jung, 2010; Ghoshal, 2005; Khurana, 2010). However, ‘the fear of the formal’ uniting both of these camps represents a major challenge that has to be overcome.

In the final part of the paper, we shall take a few steps in this direction. First, we shall argue that in spite of all the ills attached to formality within the field of organisational analysis, as elsewhere in the present, there can be no such thing as organisation without the presence of formality. In making this point, we have recourse to the work of the chief executive, minister of state, and university pro-chancellor, Wilfred Brown. After having presented this, we conclude by exploring some of the organisational and political effects of the contemporary turn to informality, ‘excess’, ‘spontaneity’, and the like. We suggest that rather than residing in formality, as many critics argue, contemporary organisational pathologies can be traced to the operationalisation of the assumption that formality is a fraud that should be dispensed with.

The first major research project undertaken by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was an investigation into joint consultation in industry in the UK. It involved work in one enterprise, the Glacier Metal Company, for two and half years between 1948 and 1950, and deliberately ranged more widely than reference to ‘joint consultation’ might suggest. Indeed, over three decades from the beginning of the study its director, Elliott Jaques, and the Managing Director of the company, Wilfred Brown, both individually and collectively, developed a programme that became recognised in its time as having as significant an impact on organisational and management thinking as the Hawthorne experiments, but which is now largely relegated to a footnote in the history of organisation theory. Of the two, it was Wilfred Brown who elaborated a distinctive approach to organisation theory as a ‘practical science’ (du Gay, 2015; du Gay & Vikkelsø, 2014), one that still possesses considerable significance today, or so we shall argue. As Alistair Mant (2007) has put it, ‘Brown was in the great tradition of pioneers of industrial practice, in staying with the problems, devising empirical solutions, and developing theory the while.’ He continues, ‘Brown was about clarity, precision of concept, formality, and the centrality of authority as liberating factors.’ For many contemporary organisational analysts, as we have indicated, formality and authority are the antithesis of flexibility and liberty, not their concomitants. It is unsurprising, then, that Brown is no longer a household name in the field of organisation theory.

This does not mean, though, that his formulations possess no traction, for, as Weber had it, ‘not liking is hardly refuting’ (quoted in du Gay, 2013, p. 89). As Brown indicated with characteristic frankness in The glacier project papers,

For Brown, such suspicion or overt denigration of formality and formalisation ‘distorts the whole frame of reference within which organisation as a subject is considered’ (1965b). Between 1939 and 1947, as Chief Executive at Glacier, Brown admitted he followed both human relations and group relations orthodoxies which were less than favourably inclined to ‘formality’, equating them with instrumentalism, rationalism and technicism, with the effect that the structure of roles and their relation one to another within the Glacier organisation became ‘hopelessly confused. The result was a dangerous weakening of the authority of managers and no consequential feelings of freedom or satisfaction on the part of the members of the company’ (Brown, 1965b). This confusion and the consequent negative impact upon organisation, he indicated, was in no small part due to the un-organisational nature of much human-relations and group-relations thinking. For Brown, the latter schools often assumed that the actual job, its technology and its mental and physical requirements were relatively unimportant compared to the social and psychological situation of people at work:

– that is, formally. In Exploration in Management, he succinctly sets out this credo

For Brown (1965a, pp. 64–65), it was clear that unless prescribed boundaries were set on the decision-making work that employees undertook within an organisation, it would be impossible to co-ordinate their work ‘towards a common end’. If top management did not set co-ordinating policies that prescribed the discretion of managers throughout the organisation, individual managers would be ‘entitled to make decisions that could create chaos’. This is because without prescribed boundaries to their discretion, managers would not know where their ‘authority and responsibility to make decisions starts or finishes’. They could not then be held accountable ‘either for failure to make necessary decisions or for making decisions which, in fact, usurp the authority’ of their own managers. As a result, work and thus ‘organizing’ would be conducted in ‘a twilight of continuous uncertainty’ (Brown, 1965a, p. 63).

For Brown (1965b, p. 153), morally-expressivist appeals to ‘informality’ as the bedrock of organisational creativity, innovation, freedom and flexibility were ‘the converse of my business experience’. They were, rather, appeals to dis-organise; to return to ‘a natural condition’ in the Hobbesian sense. As Brown (1965b, pp. 153–54) put it, ‘a deliberate policy of leaving organisation unformulated is tantamount to the deliberate setting up of a situation of anarchy. I use the word “anarchy” in its original sense, that is, “the want of government in a state”’. Echoing Hobbes’s (1991) (in)famous statement, ‘where no Law, no Injustice’, Brown argues

Brown (1976, p. 289) stressed the need for an explicit acknowledgment that what he called the ‘executive system’⁵ was

He then posed the rhetorical question: To ‘what extent is this to be done with deliberation and in a statable manner’, in other words, ‘formally’, and to what extent is it ‘to be left to be decided by the pressure generated by group and individual interaction’, in other words, informally (Brown, 1976, p. 289)? His answer is clear and precise:

Nor would it be a situation in which the efficiency of, or indeed prospects of survival for, the enterprise (and thus the securing of the purposes for which it was instantiated) was enhanced. No doubt informal groups are capable of improvising a kind of order, but what the latter is and how it contributes to the securing of an overall organisational purpose can only be known after the event, as a historical fact; there will be no prior, logistical guarantees. The latter, after all, is the provenance of ‘formality’ (Stinchcombe, 2001).

Even at the time of its development, much of what Brown articulated about the relationship between authority, formality and organisation appeared counter-intuitive, and, as a result, out of step with contemporary organisational opinion (Gray, 1976; Mant, 2007). This is even more so nowadays, when, as we have noted, so much work in organisation theory has adopted a metaphysical stance towards its core object, with the result that once-key concepts in the field, including ‘authority’, ‘formality’ and even ‘organisation’, are deemed anachronistic and largely irrelevant to contemporary concerns. This fear of the formal, however, is far from salutary. In our discussion and concluding comments we will first indicate some of its practical effects, and after this address some of its theoretical implications.

In his prize-winning trilogy charting the career of an Australian woman employed in the League of Nations in Geneva during the inter-war years, Frank Moorhouse has some interesting things to say about the various different ways one might come at the relation between formality and informality in organisation.

The story of Edith Campbell-Barry, a would be-ideal typical bureaucrat, is told against the rise and fall of the fortunes of the League, which is, itself, for Moorhouse it seems, a model of the ideal-typical public organisation. At an early point in Grand Days, the first book in the series, soon after her arrival in Geneva, we find Edith stealing in and out of the office of the Secretary General of the League. Edith is not an official leader of the institution. Rather, she is a recent and rather junior recruit. However, she is a very principled new recruit and is keen, impatient, even, for the League to live up to what she considers to be its better nature.

Edith is, in fact, impersonating the real Secretary General, Sir Eric Drummond, by using his office, his official stationery, and his forged signature to send out letters to groups around the world that Edith thinks deserve the official support of the League. She is convinced that what she is doing, whilst informal, spontaneous, covert and unofficial, is in fact ethical because it is in the cause of true principle, as she sees it. She literally cannot bear the thought that those in need of support are failing to receive it because of the highly-bureaucratic way in which the League’s operations are conducted. The organisation’s cumbersome, formal rules and due-process obligations undermine its capacity to live up to its pressing moral obligations, as she sees it. She wants to bypass all this red tape and get things done ASAP.

At a crucial juncture, however, one of Edith’s colleagues, Florence, who has become aware of what Edith is up to, asks her to use her access to the Secretary General’s office to send out a memo internally to some of their colleagues. Florence has none of Edith’s high-minded zeal, she just wants them to concoct a humorous message under the auspices of the Secretary General’s office so that their colleagues will be impressed by their wily skills.

At this point, Edith begins to have doubts. She wonders what would happen if everyone took it upon themselves to act as she had, and, in effect, to ‘pursue private policies by stealth’? How dysfunctional and potentially catastrophic for the fulfilment of the League’s ‘core task’ or purpose could this be? Edith suddenly sees the episode from the Secretary General’s point of view. And from this perspective she gets a sense of how important it is for employees to act within the confines of their respective offices, and to be on guard against the temptations of informality, impatience, impetuosity, and heart-led enthusiasms. She begins, indeed, to perceive the significance of ‘formal organisation’ and what Weber termed ‘the ethos of bureaucratic office-holding’:

There is a particular lesson to be drawn from this tale about seeing formality as a fraud, and about the problems that attend the institutionalisation of a disposition of ‘restless eagerness’, or ‘enthusiasm’. It is one which has been learned, often at some cost, time and again in any number of organisational settings. It is one that Weber articulated in his political writings, and one with which Franz Kafka (2015; du Gay, 2008), perhaps surprisingly to some, concurred. We find it articulated in recent times, for instance, in official investigations into events surrounding the decision to go to war in Iraq conducted on both sides of the Atlantic (in the UK, The Hutton and Butler Inquiries, for instance), and in official investigations into various corporate collapses in the wake of the financial crisis (the Valukas report into Lehmans, the UK Parliamentary Committee on Banking Standards report into HBOS, for example).

When one dispenses with formality and in its place puts ‘informality’, ‘spontaneity’, and ‘improvisation’ as signposts for practical organisation, it is only a matter of time before organisations start to disintegrate, responsibilities become hopelessly confused, and organisational members are invited to pursue private priorities at the expense of organisational goals. Whether in the public or the private sector, the necessity of having guidelines for conduct, and clearly demarcated roles, is of paramount importance.

In the public sector, as the story about Edith at The League of Nations illustrates, the antipathy towards restless eagerness, enthusiasm, or impatience inherent in ‘a bureaucratic ethos’ has its own raison d’être. While it is easy to see how such an ethos can be viewed by politicians, disruptive innovators and others as a license to obstruct, it was, until comparatively recently, generally considered indispensable to the achievement of responsible (as opposed to merely ‘responsive’) government, because it was seen to balance and even complement political will, making governance more effective in the long run. As the American scholar John Rohr (1998) suggested, the bureaucratic ethos is in important respects necessarily unresponsive. The role accorded to governmental bureaux, for instance, has been deliberately devised to isolate officials from the electoral process, or from the demands of ‘special interests’, for example, thus institutionalizing the very ‘unresponsiveness’ which so many enthusiasts decry. And it has been so organised to serve a positive political purpose – to help preserve a modicum of stability, consistency, and continuity, and institutional memory in the face of the vagaries and experimental enthusiasms of partisan politicians, for instance. In this specific and limited sense, the bureaucratic ethos is a conservative one, or better, a conservational one. Bureaucratic practices, that is, formal organisation, in public administration can be seen to provide some of the important ‘conservation standards’ appropriate to the political management of the state, including the management of ‘change’ within the state.

In the private sector, the need for formality as an organisational ideal is no less important. As we have shown, Wilfred Brown warned of the dangers associated with adopting an informal stance in relation to organisational matters. This is a lesson worth repeating, not least in our time where we fetishise ‘start-ups, disruptors, and rebels’, and where nobody ‘wants to be an Organisation Man’ (Brooks, 2015, p. 115). This current anti-formal mindset ‘has contributed to institutional decay’, because, as ‘the editor Tina Brown has put it, if everybody is told to think outside the box, you’ve got to expect that the boxes themselves will begin to deteriorate’ (Brooks, 2015, p. 115). In conjunction with three decades of deregulation, market romanticism, and idealisation of entrepreneurship, this ‘thinking out of the box’-mentality has made it abundantly clear that there are significant practical costs associated with a ‘fear of the formal’. The results are not only detectable in the proliferation of dysfunctional, economically-informed management models that have infiltrated organisational life and created considerable political, social, and economic chaos (Davis, 2011; Dobbin & Jung, 2010; Ghoshal, 2005; Styhre, 2015). It is also visible in the increasing public suspicion towards management as such, which has led Nohria and Khurana (2008) to propose the necessity of having a ‘Hippocratic Oath for managers’. Such an oath should perhaps not merely be seen as an attempt to turn management into a profession, thereby fulfilling an ambition initially set forth in the first half of the twentieth century (Khurana, 2010). It could also be seen as an attempt at finding a substitute and a cure for the decline of effective and responsible organisation that the fear of the formal has brought with it. Viewed from this perspective, the oath could be seen as an attempt to formalise the duties and responsibilities appropriate for the manager as a specific ‘persona’, thereby reenacting several principles resonant with formal organisation. Whether appropriate or not to solve current problems of organisation, the very formulation of such an oath seems to testify to the fact that organisation throughout the last couple of decades has become too loose, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘informal’, and, as a consequence, dysfunctional. While the institutionalisation of a Hippocratic Oath for managers might have some benign effects, our contention here would be that several of the answers needed to solve the problem of ‘how to make up good organisation’ can be lifted directly off the pages of books of classical organisation theory, not least Wilfred Brown’s.

Turning from the necessity of formality for public and private organisations to some of the theoretical implications associated with the prevailing ‘fear of the formal’, we shall end here by indicating a couple of interrelated problems. First, as we have seen, a whole range of theorists have, from different points of departure, criticised formal organisation for being repressive, authoritarian, favouring a management perspective, lacking spontaneity, imprisoning humans, and a range of other ills. In the process of making such critiques, scholars have started from a range of premises antithetical to formal organisation. Whether it was ‘self-actualisation’, ‘individually held norms and beliefs’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘informality’, ‘excess’, ‘otherness’, ‘resistance’, or some other notion, several of the criticisms have been developed by utilising concepts and ideas initially conceived outside the fields’ established cannon, thereby broadening organisational theorizing in new directions and towards new objects. To some extent this can be seen as an expected course for a field that has never been mono-disciplinarily anchored, and furthermore always been characterised by internal critiques and contestations (Westwood & Clegg, 2003, p. 3). The question is, however, which costs the critiques, cumulatively viewed, have had. Should we be optimistic about the future of Organisation Theory (Engwall, 1982; March, 2007), or perhaps even celebrate the current state of the field (Lounsbury & Beckman, 2015)?

Although it is certainly true that the field has been growing, measured by various quantitative indicators (Lounsbury & Beckman, 2015), it is our contention that in spite of the fact that several of the novel modes of theorizing have opened up new horizons, they have at the same time eroded the very grounds that legitimised organisation theory as a distinct mode of intellectual inquiry to begin with. More precisely, in criticizing formal organisation, in attempting to start from new premises, no matter whether these were founded on psychological, economic, sociological, or philosophical premises, several of the new modes of theorizing have effectively undermined the very key object and concept, that is, formal organisation, that allowed organisation theory to establish itself as a distinct academic field to begin with (Barnard, 1968; Blau, 1968; Blau & Scott, 1963; Brown, 1965a, 1965b). In this way, ‘the fear of the formal’ has been incredibly productive, theoretically speaking. However, the costs of this have at the same time been the development of a field that has progressively alienated itself from what was its original raison d’être.

The question obviously then becomes whether such a development is tolerable in light of the proliferation of ever-new theoretical perspectives. Is it romantic and nostalgic to be suspicious of ‘the fear of the formal’, and to hold on to the importance of formal organisation as the rightful key concept and object of organisation theory? We do not think so. Instead, we propose that organisation scholars overcome their ‘fear of the formal’, and once again confront what used to be the field’s key concept and object. In doing so, organisation scholars might be able to contribute more directly to matters of public importance, rather than battling their peers in competition on theory novelty and ‘roi-search’ (Alvesson, 2013). In stating this, we follow Gary Wickham’s (2012) recent work. Wickham states that the discipline of contemporary sociology has increasingly come to appear as a constellation of different milieus that battle each other by trying to impose their own special conceptual constructs on the discipline as such, rather than addressing ‘society’, that is, what ought to be, and historically has been, sociology’s key object. As Wickham makes clear, this ‘balkanisation’ undermines the public standing of sociology by decreasing the probability that sociology can contribute much in relation to pressing political and social problems. This insight, we think, could just as rightly be utilised in relation to organisation theory. If anything, it might even be more needed here. The reason for this is that not only has organisation theory been plagued by the same development as that described by Wickham. The field has additionally been characterised by a direct contestation and critique of what used to be its key concept and object, that is, formal organisation.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.