PRESENTATION
(Paolo de Vita)
The importance currently attributed to culture, complexity and change is seen in the fact that such topics are being investigated in spheres which are still relatively virgin territory in organization studies. An example is the sphere of cultural institutions, covering such vaied terrain as schools and universities, museums and libraries, research centres and foundations; in short, institutions large and small which seek to consolidate, elaborate and disseminate knowledge, promoting discussion and cultural awareness and stimulating progress.
The institutional, structural, technical and social variety of these organizations certainly makes it hard to view them as a single category featuring homogeneous mechanisms and patterns of behaviour. Nor indeed would this be either constructive or desirable. Hence the author’s decision to use the methodology of case studies, reflecting a growing trend in recent research, is fully justified. This does, however, involve the risk of proceeding from the single case to hasty, contentious generalisations; instead the aim should be to discover chunks of reality and then situate and interpret them in a wider and more productive perspective.
This is precisely the task which Luigi Maria Sicca has set himself – and has to our mind successfully accomplished – in this volume. His track record of research into the organizational aspects of institutions engaged in producing and exploiting culture shows admirable constancy and dedication. In this case the field work concerns a prestigious Italian institution which has secured a redoubtable reputation on the international scene over the last decades. Thanks to a robust theoretical reflection grounded in an approach to organizations as a “dynamic structuring process”, this field work has thrown up various topics which are familiar in organization studies but which here receive a stimulating and original treatment. In the specific case of a cultural institution, what is the relationship between promoting culture and being a culture? To what extent and with what consequences can a small organization come to terms with a large and complex environment? How can it maintain its own cultural imprinting and manage the inevitable processes of change and adaptation? What connection can be established between the organizational action (as transpires from a longitudinal case study) and the more tenuous traces of meta-organizational action, detectable prior to and outside the “organizational entity” sensu stricto, but which nonetheless has a fundamental impact on the subsequent structuring process? Drawing on the observations and information acquired during his study of the case in question, the author elaborates a number of complex and stimulating reflections and discusses various hypotheses for their interpretation. He can count not only on his talent for scrupulous analysis and elaboration, but also on a well structured narration which makes for agreeable reading.
The book is divided up into three chapters. In Chapter 1 the “research methodology” is laid out, not as an excursus in questions of principle but rather as a case study in methodology. The author gives an honest account (as in a “confessional”) of the moments of heartache and enthusiasm which accompanied his period of participative observation, the principal methodology adopted. The theoretical elaboration continues in the following chapter, where he refers to a common thread linking some of the founding fathers of organization theory, from Parsons to Weber, Barnard and Simon, and on to Thompson and beyond. In this framework Sicca highlights three key issues which are taken up in empirical terms in Chapter 3. The first concerns the relationship between organization and environment and the way this can be investigated in terms of a longitudinal analysis. The second is the issue of complexity, which in the case of an extremely small organization involves the structural variability of organizational action. And thirdly the importance of organizations as producers of culture is discussed, in the triple sense of “identifying” with a culture, “being” a culture and “possessing” a specific culture.
The final chapter represents the author’s handling of the empirical material acquired during his field work. This too could be viewed as a case study in its own right, but it can only be deciphered on the basis of the work as a whole. In the longitudinal perspective time, viewed from the researcher’s standpoint, can be divided up into three organizational “dramas” interspersed with “routines”, the dramatisation of the events emerging clearly from what the actors have to say about the organizational reality of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies.
In his review of the long and turbulent phases which preceded the Institute’s foundation, the author succeeds in establishing its original organizational conformation, which although apparently skeletal was not without its problems and contradictions. In this context the spotlight falls on its illustrious founder, who not only set everything in motion but also initiated the participative process which characterises the Institute’s organizational action, while at the same time maintaining close ties with the scientific and political establishment. This participative process has proved to be fundamental not only for the survival and growth of the Institute but also for the cultural well-being of its environment (to give just two examples, the thousands of bursaries awarded to young scholars, and the cultural and political mobilisation of students which galvanised Naples in the decade following the fall of the Fascist regime in 1943). The reader gradually becomes aware of possible answers to the research issues which the author raised at the outset, while the interpretative hypotheses open up interesting perspectives in a study which proves rich in stimuli and insights.