Dewey or Foucault?: Organization and Administration as Edification and as Violence

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Abstract
This article takes up two clashing traditions of how to view organizations and their possibilities. One tradition, exemplified by John Dewey, sees organizations as edifying forums, while the other, indicated by Michel Foucault, views organizations as controlled violence. Both views are indispensable to understanding organizational behavior, and they come together in questioning the power of theory as a tool of social transformation. Approaches to organizational and administrative structure have all been relatively sanguine about the possibility that theory can identify proper solutions for organizational failings. Whatever organizations are, whether we think of them as incubating new cultures or defined by the background society in which they exist or as machines needing highly formalized structural definition and control, they are artificial and contained and are therefore vulnerable to being made over completely in accordance with theory. Neither Dewey nor Foucault placed much faith in the transfigurative power of theory. The battleground of these two thinkers was not theory, but hope. Dewey allows room for hope in his treatment of organizations while Foucault does not. In the end we need both the fatalism of Foucault and the optimism of Dewey to inform our understanding of organizations.