New organizational forms – the necessity of overcoming over socialized and sub-socialized perspectives

Abstract

This paper considers that an analysis about new organizational forms must overcome both subsocialized and under socialized perspectives. It means that it’s necessary to overcome respectively the studies that understand the organizational forms merely as a cultural issue and the studies which usually focus their analysis strictly on the economic aspects or on the market forces.

Both social and economic organizational forms are at the same time dependent and independent on the cultural and institutional context in the different countries. Thus, they are embeddedness in this framework, and in this sense, multiple identities are something possible but not necessarily derived from a dominant culture. According to Clegg (1990), the process and mechanisms that allow organization and the disorganization must be the theoretical object of analysis, not necessarily the organization per se. This study proposes the concept of embeddedness as an analysis framework that can overcome limits of the approaches usually adopted to identify and understand new organizational forms.

The concept of embeddedness and its mechanisms allows evincing different narratives (cultural, political, structural, and cognitive). These narratives allow us to understand the way organizations are arranged and how they change, in the sense they focus on different questions in a so uncommon perspective in terms of organizations studies.