Negotiated Order Theory
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[edit] Some Notes on Negotiated Order Theory
(Assembled by Les Gasser, 20060131)
Below are two discussions of Negotiated Order Theory (NOT) from papers that I found on the web. I think both these papers are insightful in presenting and applying NOT, and in the Thomas paper's case, even somewhat surprising. They reflect, in a brief space, the major tenets and some of the history of (and debate surrounding) the NOT perspective. Of particular interest are the references, which cover some of the classic works in the field, and name some of the central people (e.g., Maines, Strauss & colleagues, Day & Day, Hall, Fine).
From Jim Thomas, "Some Aspects of Negotiated Order, Loose Coupling and Mesostructure in Maximum Security Prisons." (A revised version appeared in: Symbolic Interaction 7(Fall): 213-231 (1984).
Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other (Genovese, 1976: 3).
As Strauss (1978: ix) has suggested, even the most repressive of social orders are inconceivable without some form of negotiation. In such total institutions as maximum security prisons, staff and inmates may negotiate their own interpretation of the social order, often constructing an alternative that may be just as formal, although tacit, as that it replaces. The concept of negotiated order provides a useful way of displaying how such social orders emerge and become processed in the mesostructure of organizational life.
Negotiated order is the consequence of give-nd-take interaction within settings predefined by broader, and usually more formal, rules, norms, laws, or expectations, in order to secure preferred ends (or "stakes").
"The negotiated order on any given day could be conceived of as the sum total of the organization's rules and policies, along with whatever agreements, understandings, pacts, contracts, and other working arrangements currently obtained" (Strauss, 1978: 5-6).
Although friendly critics of the persepctive have argued that it has not been adequately attentive to issues of power, history, politics (Day and Day, 1977, 1978), or social structure (Benson, 1977, 1978), advocates (e.g., Scheff, 1968; Strauss, et. al., 1963; Strauss, 1978, 1982; Kleinman, 1982; Hall and Hall, 1982; Busch, 1982; Maines, 1977a, 1977b, 1982a; Sugrue, 1982; Levy, 1982; Horowitz, 1982; Fine, 1984; Luckenbill, 1979; O'Toole and O'Toole, 1981) have illustrated that the perspective is not inappropriate for clarifying, if not fully addressing, such issues. Two supplemental concepts, mesostructure and loose coupling, facilitate examination of the interrelationship between organizational structure, social order and interaction.
References
Busche, Lawrence. 1982. "History, Negotiation, and Structure in Agriculture Business." Urban Life, 11(October): 368-384.
Benson, J. Kenneth. 1978. "Reply to Maines." Sociological Quarterly, 19(Summer): 497-498.
Day, Robert A. and JoAnne V. Day. 1978. "Negotiated Order Theory: An Appreciation and a Critique." Sociological Quarterly. 18(Winter): 126-142.
Day, Robert A. and JoAnne V. Day. 1978. "Reply to Maines." Sociological Quarterly. 19(Summer): 499-501.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1976. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage.
Hall, Peter and Dee Ann Spencer-Hall. 1982. "The Social Conditions of Negotiated Order." Urban Life. 11(October): 328-349.
Horowitz, Ruth. 1981. "Passion, Submission and Motherhood: The Negotiation of Identity by Unmarried Intercity Chicanas." Sociological Quarterly. 22(Spring): 241-252.
Kleinman, Sherryl. 1982. "Actors' Conflicting Theories of Negotiation: The Case of a Holistic Health Center." Urban Life, 11(October): 312-327.
Levy, Judith A. 1982. "The Staging of Negotiations between Hospice and Medical Institutions." Urban Life. 11(October): 293-311.
Luckenbill, David F. 1979. "Power: A Conceptual Framework." Symbolic Interaction, 2(Fall): 97-114.
Maines, David R. (ed.). 1982a. Issues in Negotiated Order, special issue of Urban Life, 11(October).
David R. Maines, (1982b) "In Search of Mesostructure: Studies in the Negotiated Order," Urban Life 11 (October): 267-279
Maines, D.R. (1977a) "Social organization and social structure in symbolic interactionist thought" Annual Review of Sociology, 3, 235-259
Maines, D.R. (1977b) "Structural parameters and negotiated orders: comment on Benson and Day and Day" Sociological Quarterly, 19, 491-496
O'Toole, Richard and Anita Werner O'Toole. 1981. "Negotiating Interorganizational Orders." Sociological Quarterly. 22(Winter): 29-41.
Strauss, Anselm. 1978. Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
From Modell, Sven. "Institutional and Negotiated Order Perspectives on Cost Allocations: The Case of the Swedish University Sector." European Accounting Review (Forthcoming).
(From pages 4-5:)
To further our understanding of how social and political negotiations impinge on the framing of the ambiguity associated with cost allocations we enrich the institutional perspective with insights gleaned from the negotiated order literature (cf. Basu et al., 1999). This literature sees social structures, such as cost allocation rules, as manifestations of explicit or implicit negotiations, subsuming notions such as bargaining, mediation, collusion and compromise, between actors with more or less competing interests (Maines, 1977a; Strauss, 1978).
...
By combining the institutional and negotiated order perspectives, we focus attention to those relatively rare and discrete events (Burns and Scapens, 2000) at which new institutional rules are introduced and trigger re-negotiations, whilst recognizing that such negotiations are institutionally embedded and conditioned by past institutionalisation processes (Basu et al., 1999).
(From pgs 9-11:)
Originating from the work of Strauss et al. (1963), the negotiated order perspective has become an influential strand within symbolic interactionist thought (Maines, 1977a; Maines and Charlton, 1985). From the outset this perspective placed the interplay between social actors centre stage and thus took a pronounced anti-determinist position in analysing the emergence and (re-)construction of organizational practices and denounced more simplistic, structurally orientated explanations of social order such as those typically stemming from functionalist organizational analyses (Strauss, 1978). This interplay is described as a series of more or less ongoing negotiations between interested parties whilst the resulting but temporally limited social order, or structure, guides their perceptions and thus conditions future negotiations (Fine, 1984). Such ongoing re-constructions have been described as continual permutations of action (Strauss, 1993). Accordingly, what are considered institutionalised rules at any specific point in time may be viewed as a product of past negotiations whilst these may be re-negotiated if the negotiation context is amenable to change (Maines, 1977a; Strauss, 1978).
The negotiation context encompasses aspects typically contributing to varying levels of ambiguity, such as the number of negotiating parties, their relative balance of power and the number, complexity and clarity of legitimacy boundaries of the issues involved (Strauss, 1978). Such properties may have direct bearing on the negotiation and establishment of cost allocation rules. Whilst potentially constituting an outcome of past negotiations (Modell, 2002), ambiguous cost allocation rules may also fill an enabling role as part of the negotiation context. For example, Rahaman and Lawrence (2001) found that overhead allocations contributed to concealing and mediating a complex web of continuously re-negotiated agreements related to contentious pricing issues. Rather than adhering to some strict economic rationality the scope for applying alternative costing principles was utilised in negotiating and legitimizing price increases to certain customers whilst keeping to past agreements established with more powerful constituents constraining cost allocations and rate-setting.
The critical debate surrounding the negotiated order perspective and its subsequent theoretical articulation give some clues as to how it may be fruitfully integrated with institutional theory. With some exceptions (e.g., Hall, 1972), early advances in the negotiated order literature arguably downplayed the larger macro environment in which negotiations take place with the effect that historical, political and structural contingencies conditioning power relationships between the negotiating parties were not adequately brought to the fore (Day and Day, 1977). Whilst attempts to rectify this have been made (e.g., Maines, 1977b; Strauss, 1978), the notion of power has remained largely implicit in empirical research informed by the negotiated order perspective although it is increasingly recognized that power is not a static property but may be continuously negotiated (Basu et al., 1999; Fine, 1984; Rahaman and Lawrence, 2001). Such criticisms have led to calls for locating the negotiated order perspective within a more encompassing conceptual framework based on some companion social theory (Day and Day, 1977; Fine, 1984).
References
Basu, O.N., Dirsmith, M.W. and Gupta, P.P. (1999) "The coupling of the symbolic and the technical in an institutionalised context: the negotiated order of the GAO's audit reporting process", American Sociological Review, 64: 506-526.
Burns, J. and Scapens, R.W. (2000) "Conceptualising management accounting change: an institutional framework", Management Accounting Research, 11: 3-25.
Day, R. and Day, J.V. (1977) "A review of the current state of negotiated order theory: an appreciation and critique" Sociological Quarterly, 18, 126-142.
Fine, G.A. (1984) "Negotiated orders and organizational cultures" Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 239-262.
Hall, P.M. (1972) "A symbolic interactionist analysis of politics", Sociological Inquiry, 42, 32-75.
Maines, D.R. (1977a) "Social organization and social structure in symbolic interactionist thought" Annual Review of Sociology, 3, 235-259
Maines, D.R. (1977b) "Structural parameters and negotiated orders: comment on Benson and Day and Day" Sociological Quarterly, 19, 491-496
Maines, D.R. and Charlton, J.C. (1985) "The negotiated order approach to the analysis of social organizations" Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 8, 217-308
Modell, S. (2002) "Institutional perspectives on cost allocations: integration and extension" European Accounting Review, 11, 653-679.
Rahaman, A.S. and Lawrence, S. (2001) "A negotiated order perspective on public sector accounting and financial control", Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 14, 147- 165.
Strauss, A. (1978) Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes and Social Order, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Strauss, A. (1993) Continual Permutations of Action, DeGruyter, New York.
Strauss, A., Schatzman, L., Ehrlich, D., Bucher, R. and Sabshin, M. (1963) "The hospital and its negotiated order" in Freidson, E. (ed) The Hospital in Modern Society, New York, Free Press.
