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chapter 1 Empirical Starting Points Notwithstanding the increasing murkiness in what has been regarded as general social theory associated with the rise and fall of positivism over the last seventyodd years, there have been important pockets of illumination, new and important clarifications of complex and elusive matters of fact that a comprehensive empirical theory must incorporate. Group and Organization Anthropologists and sociologists often start discussions of organizational theory with a distinction between emic aggregates that are recognized as meaningful by their participants and etic aggregates based on objective criteria imposed by an outside viewer. A family might be an example of the former; a group waiting to cross at a traffic light is an example of the latter. Like all other applications of the subjective-objective dichotomy, this is more problematic than it might at first seem. While there is a difference between a set of people arbitrarily grouped together and a group that is self-recognized, the characteristics of self-recognized groups vary enormously. It is far more important for social analysis to get a sense of this variation than of the fine line between the most minimal indigenous conception and no conception at all. Moreover, who recognizes a group is not as fixed and clear as the distinction seems to suggest. When I present a purely arbitrary idea such as social class as defined by some occupational grouping to a university class in anthropology or sociology, it is never long before the students start speaking of themselves in its terms. Has the etic concept then become emic? When Marx’s term “capitalism” is used by Americans as though it did in fact describe their economic system, is it emic or etic? Either way, if this is the first step, what is the next? A much firmer yet more inclusive starting point is with the difference between groups and organizations. Groups are aggregates of people whose members can 1 human organizations and social theory be named but whose mutual relations cannot be. Organizations are people under some common group name and with mutually adjusted behavioral expectations. Both of these are both emic and etic. This distinction accords with ordinary usage but also makes empirical sense. People in communities everywhere have indigenous concepts for groups as distinct from organizations, and we can also recognize them objectively. We can get lists of their members. People in communities also recognize that they have organizations as distinct from the groups that form them, and we can recognize this objectively as well. We can describe the positions and their mutual relationships. The members of self-recognized groups may or may not form organizations, but an organization will always define a group. This is extremely important. Organizations In the most general sense, an organization exists wherever organisms engage in a mutualadjustmentofbehavior,meaningthatwhatoneorganismdoesisdependent on what others are expected to do. In this sense, all sorts of natural communities are organized. But for human beings there is more. For us, an organization is not only a mutual adjustment of behavior but one that the participants are conscious of engaging in, that has a name or designation, that involves mutual recognition by the members of each other, that involves conscious commitments of the members to each other, and that the members expect to persist over a specifiable time period. More briefly, an organization in the strict sense is a mutual adjustment of behavior in a named arrangement based on conscious agreement and mutual recognition . An organization is thus inherently anticipatory. It looks ahead. Usually this named arrangement is an association in a jurisprudential sense, but it may not be. A sale transaction involves the creation of an organization (for the moment of the transaction) but does not create an association. In this strict sense, a named entity that involves no actual mutual adjustment of behavior is not an organization, and neither is a mutual adjustment of behavior that is not based on conscious agreement in a named arrangement. An example of the first would be what is colloquially called a dummy corporation set up to hide or transfer assets in business dealings; another example is any number of supposed social groups or classes whose members may be said by others to exist but have no actual mutually recognized behavioral expectations among themselves. Examples of the second would be people who move aside to avoid colliding when walking on the street or avoid intruding upon each other on a public beach. This definition draws on two parallel lines of...

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