Georg Simmel: The Individual and the Organization

While the previously ubiquitous influence of Max Weber on organizational analysis is arguably waning (Lounsbury and Carberry 2005), that of his contemporary, Georg Simmel, seems increasingly robust. This follows a long-term revival of Simmel's reputation in sociology and social theory; a revival largely due to the efforts of translators, editors, and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. But we may be dealing with more than the belated entry of an intellectual fashion into organization studies? The type of organization of which Weber is the supreme analyst, namely bureaucracy, has been the object of sustained intellectual and political attack over the last quarter of a century or so. The rise of new public management (NPM) and its influence upon both corporate and political decision makers has not only undermined the claim of bureaucracy to technical superiority but also has been accompanied by massive efforts to dismantle state and private bureaucracies and replace them with more flexible, customer-friendly, flatter, and, last but not least, cheaper organizational forms. Weber's influence may thus be declining with the fortunes of the organizational type that he considered to be the ultimate expression of modern instrumental rationality, leaving those who refer to him with the choice of joining the game of bureaucracy-bashing by emphasizing the critical and/or ambivalent side of his analysis (e.g. Bauman 1989) or defending bureaucracy with classically Weberian arguments concerning proceduralism, equality of treatment, and rule of law (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) (e.g. du Gay 2000). In contrast, Simmel's social theory suddenly seems more contemporary to an age that seeks to understand itself via categories such as networks, flows, and stapes.