The Life of Organizations: Vitalism, Organism, and Mechanism

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Modern organizations have been accused of being excessively mechanistic beings. Developed at first in regard to industrial organizations, the bulk of this critique targeted the role of production machines in the de-humanization of work processes. But the critique was also extended to the role of management processes and technologies in fostering “machine organizations”, operated as mechanical systems, well beyond the industrial sphere, to include all kinds of corporate, governmental and non-governmental organizations.

This panel proposes to explore the flip-side of this critique, i.e. the underlying assumption that production and management machines hindered, harmed, or destroyed the otherwise free-flowing “life” of organizations. This vitalism appears with particular clarity in philosophical, sociological and managerial discourses proposing alternative forms of organizing, that would rather foster the life of organizations – the individual life of organizational members, but also the “social life” of the organization as a collective.

The papers in the session discuss this opposition between mechanism and vitalism, with a specific focus on how the latter is defined, on its different forms and historical origins. They consider, more or less chronologically, different instances of this organizational vitalism across the twentieth century, by looking at the “demons” in Jack Morton’s Organizing for Innovation, at Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Bergsonian conception of “programs”, at the “spiritualism” in Tarde, Hayek and Polanyi’s economics of production and exchange, at the aspiration of venture capitalist Georges F. Doriot to build new companies as “living organisms”, and at the vitalist underpinnings of Customer Relationship Management systems.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Martin Giraudeau, London School of Economics

Discussant

• Lukas Rieppel

Individual Presentations

• Demons at Bell Labs - Jimena Canales

• Intangible Economies - Vincent Lepinay, Sciences Po

• Vitalist Venturing - Martin Giraudeau, London School of Economics

• Calculated Vitalism - Zsuzsanna Vargha, University of Leicester