136 6: Postmodern Th eory
interventionists are usually called consultants, and the quest for human potential
through training and intervention has given way to best practices, benchmarking,
mixed scorecards, and other more modern fashions in contemporary organiza-
tional development.
Th e paradigmatic claims of postpositivism are most evident when their logic is
applied to theories of organization and management. As oft en happens with para-
digmatic arguments, they are as much metaphor as they are models or paradigms,
and this is particularly so in presentations of the postmodern paradigm of orga-
nization and management. Furthermore, those making paradigmatic arguments
stylize, exaggerate, and make a straw man out of one paradigm to make more
impressive the counterparadigm they favor. Th e postpositivist critique of the
characteristics and practices of classic organization and management describes
them as more hierarchical, mechanical, determinate, and simplifi ed than they
really are. David Clark’s (1985) paradigmatic comparisons are especially useful
because he not only arrays contrasting (although stylized) concepts but also eval-
uates what he regards to be the success of the postpositivist paradigm. Notable is
his general conclusion that the classic organizational paradigm and the positivist
objective scientifi c logic that supports it have had remarkable staying power.
Clark’s assessment of the status of the postpositivist paradigm, although
somewhat dated, is still essentially accurate. For theoretical purposes, it is use-
ful, although simplistic, to contain the number of variables considered in the
evaluation of a public institution. Th e parsimony and elegance of an explanatory
theory can be powerful and useful. Th eories that attempt to explain everything
and to account for the possible infl uence of all variables have the advantages of
so-called thick description found in larger case studies. But they have the disad-
vantages, too: Th ey cannot convincingly account for the two or three most pow-
erful forces infl uencing an organization or a policy; nor can they convincingly
eliminate interesting possibilities that do not pan out. Th e embrace of complex-
ity in the postpositivist argument is very closely connected to other facets of the
argument—particularly indeterminance, mutual causality, and morphogenesis.
All these facets of postpositivist thought negatively evaluate the tendency of pub-
lic institutions to be stable, predictable, orderly, and reliable. Th e determinate or-
der of bureaucracy and its tendency to resist easy change, particularly change that
would be externally imposed by change agents or internally achieved by empow-
ered workers, are long-standing bugaboos to postpositivists out to make public
institutions better. At the same time, our general understanding of actual patterns
of organizational change has been considerably advanced through the use of the
postpositivist logic of change as a discontinuous meander that is far less rational
than positivist theory would predict (March and Olsen 1989). Patterns of orga-
nizational change are clearly not linear, but postpositivist characterizations of
classic institutional theory as describing linear change processes were inaccurate
to start with. Finally, hierarchy, a fundamental organizational problem from the
postpositivist perspective, turns out to have remarkable staying power. Hierarchy