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7.2 What Is a Grammar?
Before we can begin mapping concepts of grammar and organization, we need to familiarize ourselves with the critical features of the source domain. I will start with a basic definition of grammar:[1]A grammar describes a (potentially infinite) set of patterns in terms of a finite lexicon and a finite set of rules or constraints that specify allowable combinations of the elements in the lexicon.
In English, for example, the ''patterns''are sentences, the ''lexicon''consists of words, and the ''constraints''are the rules of English syntax. By specifying how words can be combined to create sentences, a grammar provides a concise way of describing a language (i.e., the set of all correct sentences and only these). A grammar embodies hypotheses about what patterns are possible, but it is not intended to predict individual patterns. English grammar offers no insight at all into what my next sentence will be, yet it describes the form of every correct English sentence. Likewise Salancik and Leblebici's (1988) grammar of food service transactions describes the set of all possible restaurants but cannot predict whether a particular restaurant will offer cafeteria style or sit-down service. Like discrete, stochastic process models (Hewes 1980), grammars describe a set of possible outcomes, and not an individual outcome. Given that grammar is perhaps the purest form of structuralism, it should not be surprising to find that, like any structuralist perspective, grammar emphasizes patterns over individual cases (Mayhew 1980).In addition to describing a set of patterns, grammars can also embody a set of testable hypotheses that provide the basis for a theoretical explanation of the observed patterns. The explanatory power of grammatical models lies in the way in which they embody structural constraints on the set of possible patterns. As Simon (1992, p. 154) notes, a description becomes an explanation when it refers to ''structural characteristics of the system.''For example, when linguists observe a sentence construction that seems valid, yet violates some hypothesized grammatical constraint, it forces them to revise the hypothesis to account for the new observation. Similarly, in other domains where grammars have been used, the process of fitting the grammar to the data progressively improves one's understanding of the structure of the data (Olson, Herbsleb, and Rueter 1994). In this way grammar provides a logical framework for testable theories about the constraints that account for any given set of observations.Grammars also provide a framework for generating new instances of a set. In linguistics, grammars are called ''generative''because they possess the mathematical capability of generating an infinite set of sentences from a finite lexicon and a finite set of rules. Generativity is an interesting property for organization theorists as well, because it suggests the possibility of predicting new organizational processes and forms based on a given set of constraints, or changes in a set of constraints (Salancik and Leblebici 1988). From a practical point of view, the generative properties of grammatical models may provide new ways to design processes (Malone et al. 1993).
Grammars are similar to scripts, but there are two important differences. First, as used in the organizational literature, the concept of a script (or event schema) is general treated as an individual level cognitive structure (Abelson 1981; Gioia and Poole 1984). By contrast, the grammatical concepts I will describe below are tied to a more general set of structures that enable and constrain the flow of events, including physical and organizational structures. Second, grammars are a more powerful representational device than scripts. Schank and Abelson's (1977, pp. 11-17) original formulation of plans and scripts was built upon a lexicon of eleven primitive actions or ''meaning units.''These units could then be combined or recombined to form any particular plan or script, such as the restaurant script. To the extent that the restaurant script is a combination of this lexicon of meaning units, it is the product of an implicit ''restaurant grammar''of the kind proposed by Salancik and Leblebici (1988). From the perspective of formal representation, generative grammars form a complete superset of scripts; there is no script that cannot also be expressed by a grammar. This is an important observation because it suggests that a grammatical approach to representing routines is not an alternative to a script based approach. Rather, it is a more powerful generalization of the same basic idea.Since we are attempting to apply grammatical concepts to a domain other than language, it is important to realize that linguists do not hold a monopoly on the concept of grammar. Grammars can be constructed for any phenomenon that can be given a sequential representation. There are grammars for DNA, polygons, curves, Korean characters, computer programs, electrical circuits, and more (see Gonzalez and Thomason 1978; Miclet 1986). Grammatical models have also been applied extensively to the study of stories and narratives (Prince 1973; Ryan 1979; Lenhert 1981; Colby, Kennedy, and Milanesi 1991). In many respects story grammars provide the most readily applicable set of grammatical tools for the analysis of organizational processes because they have been applied to the kinds of events that comprise organizational life (e.g., situated actions by individuals). To the extent that we conceive of organizational life as a kind of living narrative, story grammars are an obvious analytical tool. The utility of grammatical techniques to domains other than linguistics also helps to underscore the distinction between the general concept of grammar and the highly specific (and controversial) hypotheses of Chomskian generative grammar which are discussed in more detail below. This distinction helps define the limits and possibilities of grammatical models of organizational processes.[1]There are a large number of different kinds of formalisms that can be used to represent a grammar. A more general definition is offered by Chomsky (1956, p.114): ''By a grammar of the language L we mean a device of some sort that produces all of the strings that are sentences of L and only these.''
