3 - From functionalism to fragmentation

Summary

The unity of the discipline is nothing other than the debate between the competing lines of analysis which takes the organization as their common object. It is the absence of debate that would really threaten the discipline.

(Karpik 1988, p. 28)

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the ‘crisis’ model of social science and to show how it is used to explain intellectual divisions in both sociology and organization theory.

We argue that the power of systems analysis has diminished as new paradigms for sociology and organization theory have emerged. To support this, we describe the conceptual and methodological limitations of structural-functionalism and social systems theory. These limitations both explain the decline of functionalism as a dominant paradigm and provide analytical openings for the development of new sociological methods.

Elaborating upon this argument, we suggest that a Kuhnian (Kuhn 1962, 1970a) revolution swept across Western sociology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that this found expression in organization theory during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a result, the development of new schemes for analysing society was replicated in the study of organizations, this trend representing a move towards paradigm heterodoxy. We document the growth of crisis theory and paradigmism in organization theory and discuss specific instances of use. In particular, we analyse a range of attempts to define the theory communities of social and organization theory as paradigm structures.