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7.3 Grammar and Organizational Process

For some, the idea of a ''social grammar''of any kind is troublesome because the word ''grammar''carries some very powerful philosophical connotations: essentialism, deep structure, and universality. Because of these connotations, the notion that social life of any kind can be represented by grammatical formalisms has been disputed by social theorists such as Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Brint (1992), de Certeau (1984), Fabian (1979, 1990), and Heritage (1984), among others. As typically conceived, grammars depend on rules of syntax that determine what is grammatical and what is not. But as Heritage (1984, p. 126) argues, ''social action cannot be analyzed as 'governed'or 'determined'by rules in any straightforward sense.''Heritage (1984, p. 216) points out that flaunting a well-known rule (e.g., ''greet only acquaintances'') can be actively used to reconstitute the meaning of a situation. In this way participants may strategically use a rule without following it at all. Fabian (1979, pp. 11V2) notes that a complete grammar would need to contain ''rules for the proper violation of its rules, or rules for the change of rules,''which would lead logically to a regress ad infinitum. The objectification of rules and rule-following is only one problem. The grammatical metaphor has also been criticized for being ahistorical (Fabian 1990, p. 14) and for relying on objectivist assumptions that have been long discredited by philosophers and empirical psychologists alike (Lakoff 1987, pp. 8-10). These objections raise serious questions about the extent to which the grammatical metaphor can be applied to organizations.

To address these concerns, it is critical that we not import grammatical concepts without careful consideration of their connotations and implications. We must restrict ourselves to clear mappings between the source domain and the target domain and discard those features of the source domain that do not fit (Tsoukas 1991). The proposed mapping between grammar and organizational processes is summarized in table 7.1, and each of the rows is explained in the text that follows. To help make the mapping concrete, I will use a simple example to illustrate each part of the overall metaphor: a trip to a supermarket in the United States. We will examine this process from the shopper's perspective, since this is the perspective that will be most familiar. One could just as easily consider the processes of stocking the shelves, taking inventory, or other aspects of supermarket operations. The purpose, of course, is not to make a contribution to a substantive theory of shopping but simply to illustrate the use of the terminology.

7.3.1 Moves Are Like Words

The basic elements of a language are usually called an ''alphabet''or a ''lexicon''(Miclet 1986). Like atoms in chemistry these are the basic building blocks that can be combined to create more complex structures. The definition of these basic elements depends on the kind of sequences being studied. In story grammars the basic units are sometimes called ''plot units''(Lenhert 1981) or ''meaning units''(Colby, Kennedy, and Milanesi 1991). In studies of human interaction, the term ''lexicon''is more common (Hymes 1972; Fabian 1979), so this term is used here. Note that the definition of these units is always somewhat arbitrary; lexemes can be decomposed into phonemes, plot units into actions, atoms into particles, and so on. The point is that they are treated analytically as the most detailed level of description necessary for the problem at hand.

In organization theory, moves can be used to define a lexicon of organizational action (Pentland 1992). Goffman (1981, p. 24) defined moves as ''any full stretch of talk or of its substitutes which has a distinctive unitary bearing on some set or other of the circumstances in which participants find themselves.''Using this definition, Pentland (1992) identified a set of basic moves in the lexicon of a software support organization (e.g., assign, transfer, refer, escalate, and so on). Moves have some conceptual and practical advantages over other possible lexical elements, such as speech acts (Searle 1969; Winograd and Flores 1986). First, unlike speech acts and other purely linguistic concepts, the concept of a move encompasses nonlinguistic behavior (Goffman 1981). As an interaction unit, a move might consist of a combination of several different utterances and actions, the combined effect of ''has a distinctive, unitary bearing''on the situation. Furthermore moves are connected to structural features of the situation; they are constrained and enabled by the physical, ritual, and competence structure of the situation (Pentland 1992). Given Abbott's (1992, p. 428) definition of processes as ''sequences of actions located within constraining or enabling structures,''moves are an obvious choice for the elements of a lexicon.

Example Consider a trip to a typical suburban supermarket in the United States. Because of the organization of the physical space and the general expectations of the shoppers and the store management, there are certain kinds of moves that are likely to be observed: a shopper might park a car, get a shopping cart, select items, and so on. In some stores, shoppers may also request special assistance (e.g., in a meat department or at a deli counter). The shopper usually empties his or her cart onto a checkout counter of some sort (often a conveyer belt), where a cashier ''rings up''the items and the shopper pays. In some supermarkets, there may be a ''bagger''who places the purchased items in bags; in other supermarkets, shoppers do this for themselves. Finally, the shopper removes the items from the store, loads them into his or her car, and drives away. Note that this level of description is quite abstract; it does not specify the number or kind of items selected, or how payment was made. Without further specifying some constraints on the sequence, these moves could be used to construct descriptions of impossible or nonsensical processes (e.g., ringing up items that have not been selected). All we have at this point is a lexicon.

7.3.2 Performance Programs Are Like Syntactic Constituents

In addition to a lexicon, grammars often include a more abstract notion of ''syntactic constituents''(Newmeyer 1983; Cook 1988). Linguists identify categories of words or phrases that serve a particular function in the syntax of a sentence, such as noun phrases (e.g., ''the offcial,''''the document'') or verb phrases (e.g., ''is shredding''). These constituents can be combined according to grammatical rules to create sentences (e.g., ''The offcial is shredding the document''). Syntactic constituents provide a way of describing the structural features of a pattern without elaborating it all the way down to the specifics of the lexicon. Syntactic constituents also provide a way of categorizing interchangeable chunks of a sequence that are functionally similar. In the example just given, one can substitute a wide variety of different noun phrases as the subject of the sentence: ''the copier,''''the dog,''and so on. The meaning of the sentence changes, of course, but these forms are structurally equivalent. Another powerful feature of syntactic constituents is the way they can be nested together. To return to the example of the offcial, we can substitute a different, compound noun phrase at the end of the sentence: ''The offcial is shredding the document that contains the incriminating evidence.''The ability to substitute equivalent constituents and nest them together is an important part of grammar.

In organization theory, ''performance programs''(March and Simon 1958) provide an analogy to syntactic constituents. In their discussion of performance programs, March and Simon (1958, pp. 140-44) describe the way in which programs can be nested together and recombined to create larger programs. These ''programs''embody chunks of behavior that have been routinized and possibly even automated in some way. More recently Ashforth and Fried (1988) build on the concept of scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977) to describe ''mindless''routines that can be initiated by a very limited stimulus and run through until completion, unless interrupted. Abell (1987) uses the term ''molecular actions''to describe a similar concept: actions that are so tightly bound together that we usually think of them as a unified whole. These routinized chunks of behavior would seem to make excellent candidates for the syntactic constituents of organizational processes.

Example In our description of the supermarket, there are several candidates for syntactic constituents. For example, ''ringing up''a set of items involves a highly routinized set of discrete steps. Once started, it tends to go through to completion. Further, ringing up can be accomplished in several ways (e.g., manually or with a universal product code scanner). ''Making payment''also involves a set of routinized actions that can be accomplished in several different, interchangeable ways (Ventola 1987). While particular ways of ringing up or making payment may only be possible in a supermarket (e.g., coupons and food stamps are usually not accepted at restaurants), these generic activities are syntactic constituents of every kind of retail transaction.

7.3.3 Processes Are Like Sentences

Sentences are the basic unit of analysis in grammatical theories of language. In other domains, it would be individual children's stories, electric circuits, polygons, or whatever. This is perhaps the most critical aspect of the mapping because it fixes the unit of analysis—thereby determining the kinds of methodological tools that are required and the kinds of theoretical statements that are possible. In linguistics, grammar defines the set of valid sentences in a language, thereby defining the language itself.

In organization theory, the appropriate unit for grammatical analysis is a process. This seems to be the intuition that Weick (1979) was building on when he suggested that organizations construct processes from a set of ''cycles''or ''double interacts''using a set of ''assembly rules.''The grammatical metaphor applies most readily to ''stationary''processes (Hewes 1980). These are processes that involve sequences of discrete events (or states) that may repeat over time but do not change over time. Grammars, by their very nature, are synchronic, not diachronic (de Saussure 1959; Barley 1990). Grammars describe sequences of actions that are situated in time, but the time scale for any given occurrence of a sequence could be relatively short. For example, in Salancik and Leblebici (1988), the unit of analysis was a food service transaction; depending on the kind of restaurant, the entire sequence might be completed in a few minutes or a few hours, at most. For any given food service establishment, the basic sequence identified in their grammar would stay relatively constant over time. These sequences are what Van de Ven (1992) calls a ''unitary''progression of events, where only one event occurs at a time. This is the most intuitive mapping, because it compares directly to words in a sentence, or plot units in a story. However, other kinds of progressions identified by Van de Ven (1992) (parallel, divergent, and convergent) are well within the representational capacity of more advanced grammatical models (e.g., Miclet 1986 describes grammars for tree structures of various kinds).

Example In our supermarket example one can imagine recording the sequence of events in one shopper's trip to a particular store. This sequence is like a ''sentence''that could be represented and analyzed grammatically. Note that even in a single supermarket there are an enormous number of possible sequences (think of all the available items, and every possible sequence in which you could select them and pay for them). One could also collect data from multiple markets, or other kinds of retail sales interactions. If one were using a typical variance-based approach, one would summarize these sequences using a set of variables (total time, total cost, number of items, item placement, item price, etc.) that could be used to answer a variety of questions concerning consumer behavior and marketing. There is, of course, a great deal more information in the data if we retain its sequential structure. Like other sequential analysis techniques, grammatical models allow us to make use of this information by analyzing the sequences themselves, as sequences. Grammatical models allow us to ask a very different set of questions: What sequences are possible? Why do we observe these sequences and not others? What would happen if some aspect of the context were changed? These questions depend on the hypothesized nature of the structures that constrain and enable the observed processes, so let us turn our attention to this topic.

7.3.4 Organizational and Institutional Structures Provide Constraints and Affordances

Grammatical constraints are often expressed as rules for combining the elements of a lexicon. Without constraints, words in any order could be a sentence, any set of line segments could be a polygon, and any sequence of nucleic acids could be DNA. In each field where grammatical models have been applied, there is a clear set of constraints on what is and is not a proper instance of the set. Furthermore the hypothesized origin and nature of these constraints forms the basis of explanations of why certain patterns exist and others do not. Constraints form the basis for disconfirmable theory: if one observes patterns that violate a hypothesized constraint, that hypothesis can be disconfirmed. These hypotheses are often expressed as phrase structure rules (Black and Wilensky 1979; Gazdar et al. 1985) that specify the allowable combinations of syntactic constituents and other lexical items.

In organization theory, constraints on action are often thought of as rules (e.g., Drazin and Sandelands 1992). While the arguments against rule-following mentioned above would seem to preclude any rule-based grammar of organizing, that would be a hasty and incorrect conclusion. This is because grammars do not predict particular patterns or actions; the rules in a grammar do not ''determine''anything. Rather, they generate the set of possibilities for the agents in the situation. As a result it is helpful to think in terms of constraints and affordances (Gibson 1982; Norman 1988; Pentland 1992), rather than thinking of rules. This implies a shift away from deterministic, rule-like statements, toward an articulation of what is feasible in a given situation. This shift is logically equivalent to that suggested by Mohr (1982) in his distinction between variance models and process models. In Mohr's terms, a variance model implies a necessary and suffcient relationship between an antecedent and a consequent condition. In a process model, the antecedent condition is necessary but is generally not suffcient; in other words, it creates the possibility of the consequent but does not guarantee it. For this reason grammatical models are an example of the kind of process models described by Mohr (1982). As long as one keeps this distinction in mind, one can still express constraints and affordances in terms of rules, as in Salancik and Leblebici (1988). One of their rules for food service transactions states that a meal must be cooked before it is eaten. Note that this rule does not obligate anyone to eat a meal just because it has been cooked; it merely points out that reversing the sequence is impossible.

Because of the importance of structure in organization theory, we have an extensive vocabulary about constraints and affordances, as suggested in the following examples. Like any set of idealized analytical categories, they may combine in practice.

Institutional Structures The general idea of identifying constraints and affordances on action is a familiar aspect of institutional theory (Commons 1950; Jepperson 1991). It is also a central part of Giddens's (1984) concept of structure, where rules are conceptualized as resources for action. One can explore the implications of various institutional arrangements for the configuration of various kinds of transactions (Leblebici et al. 1991). Under different institutional regimes, one should observe different sequences. In some sense the whole idea of ''a trip to the supermarket''is a reflection of the institutional structures surrounding agriculture, food distribution, and the social division of labor in an industrialized economy. On a more concrete level, the range of acceptable means of payment (credit cards, food stamps, etc.) reflects specific institutional arrangements that may vary from setting to setting.

Technological Structures Norman (1988) offers an analysis of how the physical properties of technical artifacts affect the actions of users. In organization theory, technology is an important source of structure (Orlikowski 1992). Of course, technological constraint does not imply technological determinism. As Barley (1986) showed, the same technical system can result in different patterns of social interaction. Technology accounts for one of the most visible changes in American supermarkets in recent years: the introduction of universal product code scanners. This new technology eliminates the need for cashiers to type in the prices of most items. Note that if we were studying the inventory process, or the marketing process, the implications of this technological innovation would be even more significant.

Coordination Structures There are also a wide variety of constraints that emerge because of different kinds of interdependencies between actions (Malone et al. 1993). In addition to sequential constraints (e.g., step A must be completed before step B), there may be usability or simultaneity constraints on the steps of a process. Interdependencies are often introduced by the particular technology being applied in a situation; as technology changes, the degree of interdependence and the ability to manage it may change, as well. Because they explicitly affect the timing and sequence of steps in a process, coordination constraints may be a particularly interesting source of grammatical hypotheses. In a supermarket one finds a variety of sequential dependencies, such as needing to select items before you bring them to the checkout line.

Cultural Structures Cultural structures operate at many levels in an organization, including the level of appropriate behavior (Schein 1985). Culturally based norms and expectations place a great many constraints on what moves are possible, and on the appropriate sequence of moves in a given situation. While these constraints are pervasive in social interactions, they are also the most subject to strategic flaunting. As Heritage (1984) suggests, one can reconstitute the meaning of a situation by explicitly violating a rule like, ''greet only acquaintances.''In the supermarket, cultural norms govern interactions with the cashier and other customers.

Constraints and their sources should be especially interesting to organization theorists because of our interest in problems of stability and change (Gersick 1991; Leblebici et al. 1991). Depending on how the rules of organization are grounded, one would expect very different properties in terms of persistence, volatility, and so on. For example, a rule or a lexical item that is grounded primarily in a technological feature of a process subject to very abrupt revision if that technology undergoes a major change. The disruption of organizational forms resulting from technological innovation (Tushman and Anderson 1986) could be potentially be analyzed in these terms. However, a rule that has a cultural basis may persist regardless of technological changes, or it may change only slowly.

Example We are now ready to continue our supermarket example with a set of grammatical rules that embody the constraints and affordances on the process. Table 7.2 shows a generic phrase structure grammar for a trip to a suburban supermarket.

This example has been deliberately simplified so that the general ideas will be as clear as possible. At this level of generality the rules embody combinations of technological, institutional, cultural, and coordination constraints; it is diffcult to isolate pure examples of each category. A more detailed description of the process of payment (e.g., credit card validation or check approval) would start to reveal clear technological structures, for example.

In figure 7.2, the arrow symbol is read as ''consists of.''The arrows are not ''condition–action''or ''if–then''rules; they imply sequence but not causality. Thus the first rule states that a trip to the supermarket consists of 'arrive', 'select items', 'check out', and 'leave'. Each of these can be considered a syntactic constituent for the shopping trip, and is further decomposed in the subsequent rules. The process of selecting items, for example, consists of an indefinite number of repetitions of 'pick item'and 'put in cart'. One could further elaborate the process of picking an item to include comparison shopping, and so on. Similarly the check out process has a set of constituents that could be further elaborated to describe various forms of payment. Finally, one can indicate optional steps, such as ''return cart''in the rule for leaving. By using these simple rules, one can describe a limited variety of different ''trips to the supermarket''that differ mainly in the number of items selected. By adding more rules to describe alternative forms of payment, special requests at the meat counter (an alternative way to 'pick item'), one can describe a more complex set of transactions.

The grammar in figure 7.2 represents a set of hypotheses about the sequential structure of trips to the supermarket. One could test these hypotheses against actual observations of trips to various supermarkets. By coding observations in terms of the relevant lexicon, one could quite easily determine whether these rules capture the observations. In doing so, one might discover that suburban supermarkets systematically violate certain parts of the pattern. These violations would suggest revisions to the grammar, which could then be tested again. If one restricted one's attention to supermarkets, the results of this line of inquiry would be a detailed but rather boring ''theory of supermarkets.''

If one looked at other kinds of retail sales transactions, however, the questions one might ask start to get more interesting. For example, how can one describe and explain the differences between a traditional country store, where the clerk picks items for the customer, and the modern supermarket? What about differences between clothing stores (where items are routinely ''tried on''to test their usability), and food stores, where ''trying''items might be considered petty theft? One might also be interested in exploring the differences between a regular retail store and mail order. In short, there are many ways to organize the process of retail sales that depart systematically from the basic supermarket model. Grammatical models provide a way to state explicit hypotheses about these sequential processes and test them against empirical data.

So far, the concepts we have explored have been generic to any kind of grammar, whether linguistic or otherwise, and they seem to map quite well as process descriptions. In addition, there are a number more specific concepts and hypotheses that derive from Chomskian generative grammar (Newmeyer 1983; Cook 1988). They are not part of the definition of grammar per se, but given the dominance of the Chomskian perspective, concepts like deep structure have become a part of the grammatical metaphor in general and have started to emerge in the organizational literature (Gersick 1991; Drazin and Sandelands 1992). To a large extent, these additional concepts revolve around the hypothesized nature of constraints on human language: the so-called language faculty (Chomsky 1986). It is worth noting that Chomsky himself would be the last person to advocate extending these specifically linguistic ideas beyond their source domain. Despite this, these linguistic hypotheses seem to have drawn the most heated objections in the debates over the applicability of grammar to social action. Thus, for the sake of clarity and completeness, it is important to consider these additional connotations of the grammatical metaphor quite closely.

7.3.5 Organizations Have No ''Language Faculty''

In Chomskian linguistics a central hypothesis is that there exists a universal grammar for all human languages that depends on a feature of the human brain called the ''language faculty''(Chomsky 1986; Cook 1988). Universal grammar is essentially an hypothesis about the source of rules and constraints in human language. Chomskians argue that grammar is a feature of the human brain that enables people to learn languages the way that birds learn to fly. Given even a modest opportunity (e.g., a typical upbringing), humans cannot help learning a language. Which particular language we learn is determined by context, but our ability to learn it is innate, because the language faculty is a physical structure in the human brain.

In organization theory it is very hard to imagine anything that could sustain a rigorous, isomorphic analogy to this hypothesized structure of the human brain. This can be seen by recalling the list of structural constraints and affordances reviewed in the previous section. Each of these is historically situated, culturally embedded, and generally stands in a recursive relation to action (Giddens 1984). It is diffcult to imagine an institutional, technological, cultural, or coordination constraint that does not vary with context and is not subject to revision with the passage of time. Universality is simply not a characteristic that applies to the social world. The lack of an organizational ''language faculty''eliminates the possibility of a universal grammar for organizational processes: a single set of universal rules or principles that govern the syntactic structure of all organizing processes. Unless organizational theorists can identify a similar structure that is ahistorical and acultural (which we cannot), we will have to be content to apply grammatical methods to historically and culturally bounded domains.

7.3.6 Limited Distinction between Competence and Performance

Once we rule out the possibility of a structure analogous to the language faculty, a number of closely related concepts must also be questioned. For example, Chomskians traditionally distinguish between ''competence''and ''performance''(New-meyer 1983). Competence refers to the core grammatical knowledge of an idealized speaker-hearer, while performance refers to actual utterances produced in social interaction. In Chomskian linguistics a grammar is a model of the idealized language embodied in the language faculty, not of the performances produced by speakers as they go about their daily lives. Grammar embodies the normative rules for producing correct sentences, although these rules are regularly violated in actual speech.

In organizational research we could develop this analogy by treating the idealized, normative account of how a process should work as competence, and observations about how it actually does work as performance. To the extent that normative expectations have a great deal of influence on satisfaction and a host of other outcomes, this may be a valuable analogy. One might also point to formal rules or procedures as an analogy to linguistic competence because they also express an important kind of normative expectation. We could model these kinds of expectations in the form of scripts or prototypical sequences (Schank and Abelson 1977) that provide a yardstick against which actual performance could be assessed. In the supermarket, for example, if a shopper selects items and then leaves without the intervening checkout process, it is a serious violation of the normative constraint against stealing. However, these kinds of cultural or institutional constraints are, at best, only a partial description of what generates the observed patterns in a situation (Bourdieu 1977). For this reason it seems unreasonable to give them the special status implied by the analogy to Chomskian linguistics, where competence refers to the complete set of formal structures that specify the syntax of a language.

7.3.7 Organizations Have No Deep Structure

This lack of isomorphism has some additional consequences. First, it implies that the appealing notion of deep structure is inapplicable to organization theory. When organizational scholars use the term ''deep structure''(e.g., Gersick 1991; Drazin and Sandelands 1992), they are referring to the accumulation of institutional, technological, and other kinds of structures that tend to make organizations relatively stable over time. These familiar kinds of structures have little in common with the formal, decontextualized, ahistorical ''deep structure''of syntax as conceived in linguistics. Although organizational and institutional structures are obviously important, there is little to be gained by calling them ''deep.''Perhaps more important, the lack of deep structure implies that organization theorists will never achieve the strong, intuitive sense of a pattern being ''ungrammatical''that linguists have relied on so heavily in their research. We will still be able to formulate disconfirmable hypotheses about what kinds of patterns and processes are possible, but these must be tested empirically against observations of surface structure. In the following section, I discuss a number of considerations involved in doing so.