Explaining work organisation: a realist approach

Abstract

This thesis attempts to address the following problem: "Why has work been organised the way it has in a concrete business organisation?". The search for an answer moves at two levels: abstract and empirical. At the abstract level, it is argued, from a realistmeta-theoretical perspective, that existing explanatory approaches to work organisation tend to underplay either human agency or social structures or both, in favour of correlational and/or functional models of explanation. An alternative realist explanatory framework is put forward in which work organisation can be seen as forming a configuration consisting of three components. A set of managerial causal powers is postulated which interact within specific organisational contexts to form a distinctive concatenation, thus giving rise to a concrete work configuration. At the empirical level the initial research problem is contextualised through the undertaking of two casestudies. Two distinctive work configurations are reported and compared, and the reasons for their emergence are sought. It is shown that a particular concatenation of managerial causal powers has been formed within each organisational context which has given rise to two different work configurations.