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Date Submitted: 11/03/2012 04:19 AM
Organizational Conflict
Stephen Ackroyd, University of Lancaster
The Approach to Organisational Conflict.
Premodern societies are marked by more violence and other indicators of open conflict (assault, murder, mayhem, riots, insurrections and local wars) than modern ones. After reviewing much historical and anthropological evidence on aggression, violence and conflict, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker concludes: “The homicide rates in the most vicious American urban jungles today are twenty times lower than in many foraging societies. Modern Britons are twenty times less likely to be murdered than their medieval ancestors.” (Pinker, 1997:518). This sort of generalisation is supported, though usually inexplicitly and indirectly, by much other evidence and argument from researchers, including many working in the organisational studies field. Indeed, as we shall see, there is much reason to think that the development of organisations has contributed to a transformation of conflict. Very simply put, what happens with the development of numerous organisations is a significant increase in the number and variety of the relationships in which people are enmeshed (a greatly increased network density), making clear lines of cleavage and allegiance more difficult to sustain. Modern social life rests, not on a complete absence of conflict, but on a complicated gradation of aversions, indifferences and antipathies. Societies that are largely constituted by organisations or organisational societies (Presthus, 1979; Ahrne, 1990; see also Urry, 2000) feature only limited kinds of collective conflict. However, this does not support the conclusion that organisations themselves, or the kind of society largely constituted by organisations, have eliminated conflict. On the contrary, ...