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Analyzing organizations through a political lense
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Organizational behavior
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Recommended: Analyzing organizations through a political lense
To help us understand organizations, we might consider them as political systems. The political metaphor helps us understand power relationships in day-to-day organizational relationships. If we accept that power relations exist in organizations, then politics and politicking are an essential part of organizational life.
Politics is a means of recognizing and, ultimately, reconciling competing interests within the organization. Competing interests can be reconciled by any number of means. For example, resorting to "rule by the manager" might be seen as an example of totalitarian rule. On the other hand, politics may be a means of creating a noncoercive, or a democratic work environment.
As mentioned, organizations need mechanisms whereby they reconcile conflicting interests. Hence, organizations, like governments, tend to "rule" by some sort of "system". This "system" is employed to create and maintain "order" among the organization's members.
Systems of rule within organizations range from autocratic to democratic at the extremes. Between these extremes we find bureaucratic and technocratic systems. Whatever the system, each represents a political orientation with respect to how power is applied and distributed throughout theorganization. Each type of organizational "rule" simply draws on different principles of legitimacy.
According to Aristotle, politics stems from a diversity of interests. To fully understand...
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