Michel Crozier: Constraint and Freedom

In many ways, the career and work of Michel Crozier (1922-2013) do not conform to the ideals that prevailed at the time. He enrolled at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC) to avoid the medical training his father was insisting he pursue: he therefore did not attend university, let alone the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), unlike many of those who also made their mark on French sociology in the 1960s and 1970s (Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Touraine, Raymond Boudon, Jean-Daniel Reynaud, for example). He did not become acquainted with sociology in France, but through his research work with American trade unionists, which led him to travel across the United States and later to pursue his research in the United Kingdom: thus, from the very start of his career, he studied and mastered spoken and written English, and met American sociologists, psychosociologists and political scientists, who came to know and value him. He joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and, apart from two years at the Université de Nanterre, spent his entire career there, at a time when the title of university professor was, for many, the holy Grail of achievement. He conducted on-going field surveys at close quarters in workshops, departments and administrations, while simultaneously maintaining relations with French administrative and political decision-makers, through his participation in various commissions and bodies and in his role as advisor to several ministers. In doing so, he was ahead of his time in fulfilling the mission of disseminating research that is now expected of academics and researchers. Finally, his publications reflect his dual commitment to research and action, with, on the one hand, scientific productions, books and articles that are benchmarks for all those interested in organizations; and, on the other, works that increasingly took the form of essays in which he developed his personal vision of the world.

Understanding Michel Crozier’s work means first and foremost understanding the approach of a sociologist who always gave priority to what he learned in the field and from the people he met, rather than relying on surveys to discover, confirm or refute any particular major social theory. As such, his approach has always been close to the grounded theory of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss. [1]

An ontology of human beings that emphasizes their margins of freedom

In the sociology of organizations developed by Michel Crozier, this focus on the field is explained by his firm belief that human beings always find a margin of freedom within the normative, material, formal and relational constraints that restrict, determine and prescribe their behavior. This is probably the most central premise in his work, and one he never renounced, going against the theories (the second volume of his memoires was entitled A contre-courant, meaning “against the flow” [2]) that focused primarily on the influence of superstructures, membership of a social class or the institutional logics imposed by the environment, and which made it their main framework for understanding reality. Michel Crozier did not deny that such forces existed, but he believed that they were never powerful enough to fully dictate the way individuals behaved, their perceptions of the world, or their values. He was all the more convinced of this because, from the very first surveys he conducted, he had observed the existence of these margins of freedom: he was able to document them empirically, through observation and questionnaires, and even more so through what was to become his preferred investigative tool: the interview.

This positioning is reminiscent of his youthful admiration for Jean-Paul Sartre, but also of one of Michel Crozier’s personal characteristics: what he refers to, in the first volume of his memoirs, [3] as his Rumpelstiltskin-like tendency and his incurable aversion to absurd rules, unfounded limits and imposed constraints, which he always strove to overturn. This trait led him to steal time-clock records when he was a student at HEC, to lie to Georges Gurvitch and Raymond Aron after deciding to desert the former to work under the latter’s supervision on his thesis, and to try—unsuccessfully—to avoid the budget cuts imposed on him by a temporary delegate general for research. While he had margins for maneuver, they were not always enough to make him impose his views on others, as Michel Crozier had himself experienced on several occasions.

The fact remains, however, that within organizations, there are still margins of freedom that allow individuals to circumvent the rules, adapt to them, or transform them. In this, Michel Crozier set himself apart from all approaches that gave primacy to organizational structures. This might involve finding the best possible structure, by breaking down tasks, as shown by Taylor and the proponents of the scientific organization of work; seeking a perfect match between structures and environmental, technological and market characteristics, as proposed by the analyses of structural contingency from the 1950s onwards; or taking the view that individuals are prisoners of the structures, scripts and norms imposed on them by their institutional environment, as advocated by sociological neo-institutionalism from the late 1970s onwards. For Crozier, whatever the formal organization that is adopted, it will always be worked on, modified and remodeled, because the individuals who inhabit it are active: they have agency and act on the structures. Although they are bound by them, they also play with them and try to turn them to their advantage. He championed this recognition of agency above and beyond the weight of institutions long before the neo-institutionalist movement also came to embrace it and make it a recurring theme in its most recent developments. [4]

The art of the survey: interviewing to uncover strategies and power relations

Michel Crozier used the agency of individuals as a starting point, and this had far-reaching consequences for the way he designed his surveys. First and foremost, it meant listening to all the members of an organization, not just its managers, since margin for maneuver is not the prerogative of the latter: it was therefore essential to hear what people had to say, what they were experiencing, and what they were feeling, from the lowest to the highest rungs of the ladder. Accordingly, Michel Crozier’s investigations were based on a large number of interviews, [5] so as to compare and contrast the views expressed at different levels and in different departments, and to discover, beneath the divergences and convergences, the ground rules of the contingent system under study.

Interviews were Michel Crozier’s primary investigative tool ever since his early surveys of American trade unionists. Their purpose was to capture the subjectivity of the people he met, the way they perceived the constraints weighing on them, and the manner in which they responded to them. This approach was based on trust in the interviewee’s words, and on the interviewer’s ability to listen and even remain silent, allowing the silence to encourage the interviewee to say things that even a well-crafted question would never have prompted. Michel Crozier excelled in this task, and passed on the “art of inquiry” to countless students, doctoral candidates and colleagues. The purpose of interviews is not to find and confirm what one is looking for, but to understand concrete practices, to discover what one did not know, and thus to comprehend what it is relevant to observe. As a result, Michel Crozier did not study organizations on the basis of hypotheses that he then sought to verify; instead, he let “the field” speak for itself, offering surprises and revealing working methods that the investigator was unaware of, and that would have gone unnoticed if the questioning had been established in advance.

However, Michel Crozier’s interviews pursued a very specific objective. By adopting an empathetic approach, they sought to gather information on the way in which individuals conducted their business, on their network of relationships, on the problems they encountered, the solutions they found, and the conflicts and alliances in which they were involved. They thus provided a means of acquiring knowledge about the behavior of the people encountered and, through this behavior, about the margins for maneuver available to each individual, the uncertainties they managed or, on the contrary, did not manage.

Michel Crozier considered these behaviors to be rational but limited. He borrowed this notion from Herbert Simon, [6] who observed that when people make decisions, they are confronted with their own cognitive limitations (the ability to consider all possible solutions and all the consequences associated with each), and with time or financial constraints: consequently, they stop looking for solutions as soon as they find a satisfactory proposal, albeit not an optimal one. There is thus a rationality behind the decisions taken, but it is limited and must be related to the constraints and resources available to the actors, and to the way they perceive the situation. If, as Michel Crozier proposed, we regard every behavior as a decision (to behave in one way or another), then we can find a limited rationality, a meaning, behind every behavior. In other words, the analyst can reconstruct what Michel Crozier calls a strategy—the “good reasons”—as Raymond Boudon [7] would call it, that people have for behaving as they do. This strategy is rational (limited), but since it is a reconstruction carried out by the analyst, it is rarely conscious on the part of the person pursuing it. This aspect is often misunderstood by critics of organizational sociology, who have accused Michel Crozier of treating individuals as little more than self-interested schemers. While individuals may decide in advance how they will behave in some given situations (when preparing for a job interview, for example), it is more common for them to adapt their behavior spontaneously to the situation in which they find themselves, and then, if required, to readjust it just as quickly.

While strategy depends on the resources and constraints, both formal and cognitive, that weigh on individuals and give them more or less room for maneuver, it also relies on the people with whom those individuals must cooperate to develop an activity. In other words, constraints and resources are not only formal and cognitive; they are also relational. To incorporate this aspect, Michel Crozier draws on the notion of power relations, as defined by Robert Dahl [8]: rather than power being an attribute held by some and not by others, it should be understood as what is exchanged in a relationship. For example, Odile is said to exercise power over John if she can get John to behave as she wishes. Indeed, the vast majority of tasks require us to obtain the cooperation of others, and vice versa. Consequently, when we have no choice but to act as others expect of us, Michel Crozier concludes that they are exercising power over us; and when we obtain others’ cooperation, we are exercising power over them. The less dependent people are, the more unpredictable their behavior can be, i.e. the more they can mobilize their own margin for maneuver and thus bargain for their goodwill. Interviews not only reveal the behavior of the various actors, but also enable their network of power relations to be reconstructed. This in turn makes it possible to reconstruct the strategies pursued by individuals, and to identify the margins of freedom they can exploit in their exchanges with others.

Strategies and power relations are therefore of fundamental importance in the sociological approach to organizations, as Michel Crozier first wrote in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon [9] and then reiterated in a more theoretical way with Erhard Friedberg, in Actors and Systems. [10] These two heuristic tools enable us to draw on interviews and discover the contingent working methods that prevail between individuals engaged in the same collective activity. These two tools underpin the art of inquiry inherent in the strategic analysis of organizations.

From the bureaucratic phenomenon to the organizational phenomenon

Michel Crozier first applied this art of inquiry to the study of bureaucracies. However, it would be a mistake to think that his interest in the dysfunctions of the Weberian ideal of rational-legal domination stemmed from his reading of Robert Merton, Alvin Gouldner or Philip Selznick. Michel Crozier’s first contacts in American academia were mostly psychologists or psychosociologists. Instead, it was his insatiable curiosity, his thirst for understanding, his boundless appetite and interest in what those he met confided to him [11] that led him to take an interest in American and then British labor organizations, followed by the world of office workers, while his CNRS colleagues at the time were studying peasants (Henri Mendras), workers (Alain Touraine), and union relations (Jean-Daniel Reynaud). To this end, Crozier began a study of the Paris postal cheque processing center in 1954 [12], followed by a survey of tobacco manufacturing plants from 1956, and, over the same period, a comparison of six insurance companies [13]. It was only after he had collected all this material and spent a year (1959-1960) at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he began to write his doctoral thesis, [14] that he really began to interpret his survey data in the light of research on bureaucracy. This was a key stage in his intellectual trajectory and in the drafting of the book that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, since it was published almost simultaneously in English by the University of Chicago Press [15] and in French by Le Seuil, under the title Le phénomène bureaucratique.

However, once he had set up his first team, it was organizations, rather than just bureaucracies or any given professional category, that became the focus of his study and the main entry point for understanding the social world and decoding society. In part four of The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (entitled “Bureaucracy as a Cultural Phenomenon: The French Case”), he provided an analysis of French society based on his observations at the tobacco manufacturing plants and at the postal cheque processing center. His ambition was not just to understand what went on in these organizations, but to infer what they teach us about society. Several of Michel Crozier’s subsequent works—The Blocked Society [16] (1973; first published in French in 1970), On ne change pas la société par décret [17] (1979), The Trouble with America [18] (1980) and La crise de l’intelligence [19] (1995)—attest to his desire to use organizations as the basis for his reflections on society as a whole. In this respect, he was very close to the intellectual approach of Robert Merton, who was not interested in bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, but rather as a means of studying the influence of social structures on personality. [20]. However, Michel Crozier stood apart from Robert Merton in two ways. Firstly, his analyses were based on in-depth empirical investigations, as close to the field as possible, rather than on essentially theoretical reflection. Secondly, he not only considered organizations as a means of studying social structures, but also as a core factor in the development of contemporary societies. Very early on—and as Charles Perrow [21] would later write—it was clear to Michel Crozier, that modern society is “a society of organizations”: organizations must be studied because the organizational phenomenon produces society.

The research begun by Michel Crozier thus evolved from the study of organizations to that of organizational phenomena. This could be seen in the work carried out by his research team, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO), which became a CNRS research unit in the mid-1960s. Its investigations into the local politico-administrative system were not confined to examining the internal workings of local authorities, territorial administrations (especially prefectures) and regional or departmental councils; they also focused on the relationships between these entities and on the system they made up, thereby shedding light on the pattern of cross-regulation that characterized this system. In addition, in its early work on companies (starting with Electricité de France (EDF) with Renaud Sainsaulieu in the 1970s), the CSO branched out into the economic sector and began to focus on market analysis following Michel Moullet’s [22] PhD thesis on the clock auction market, and the work of François Dupuy and Jean-Claude Thoenig [23] on the household appliance market. In doing so, the French school of organizational sociology moved away from a strictly structural definition of organizations, adopting a broader interpretation that disregarded formal, legal or statutory boundaries and considered that an organization (or an organized situation) exists whenever individuals are collectively committed to achieving a common project, forming what Michel Crozier and Erhard Friedberg called “a concrete system of action” in the book they co-authored in 1977. [24] For example, a commission, the design or implementation of a public policy, or a network of subcontractors are all organized situations to be studied as concrete, contingent systems of action whose inner workings must be identified by the organizational sociologist. Some years later, this position would be even more clearly expressed by Erhard Friedberg in Power and Rules [25] when he stated that the value of the organizational approach lies in the fact that “instead of artificially separating labor markets, professional systems, the economic market and the organization, it assumes a continuum of interdependent and competitive systems of actors.” Michel Crozier and the members of the CSO thus shifted their focus from the study of organizations to the study of the organizational phenomenon.

A sociologist with multiple commitments

Michel Crozier’s intellectual contribution, through work primarily intended for his peers, was always underpinned by his commitment to transforming society. This took the (rather distant) form of partisan affiliations, as a “left-wing intellectual” during the first thirty years of his life, then, much later, as a supporter of Raymond Barre’s candidacy for the French presidency in 1988, which reinforced his image as a right-leaning sociologist.

Yet his commitment to disseminating and promoting his work was much more profound and ongoing. He was very keen to share the results of his research with the people who took part in it, and to use it to bring about change within the organizations he studied. Michel Crozier’s readership was never confined to the community of practicing sociologists, and his publications were not aimed solely at the academic world: from the outset, he was determined to use the knowledge he produced to move lines, reflect on reform and even implement it.

As soon as he began his fieldwork at the postal check processing center, he set about disseminating the results in a report in which he highlighted a key feature of French bureaucracy: those who make decisions do not have access to the information they need, which is held by others who have no interest in passing it on. He went even further in his research on the tobacco manufacturing plants, organizing the presentation of intermediate results as he developed his research methods. He sent his final report to senior management, who took a very dim view of it. The response to his findings by the senior management and then the board of directors of the Banque Nationale pour le Commmerce et l’Industrie (BNCI), a bank he was studying at the same time, was equally complicated and controversial, at least initially; Crozier recounted this reception in the first volume of his memoirs. Indeed, giving interviewees a snapshot of the way they work is not a harmless or painless gesture, even when—as Michel Crozier did in his first published findings—it shows the dysfunctions of a system and does not seek to pin blame on any individuals. And this is the basis of Crozier’s approach: the system of action and its rules, not the individuals within it, are the root cause of the tensions and difficulties observed, and must be transformed. As such, the fear of face-to-face confrontation and its avoidance are systemic: they are not attributable to the psychological structure of the agents.
Crozier’s commitment to disseminating organizational reasoning can also be seen in his regular participation in professional training sessions for managerial staff, during which he drew on the workshops at the tobacco manufacturing plant and the conclusions drawn from his study of the postal check processing center to work on specific cases, before expanding his case studies with further research to be used in both initial and further training.

Michel Crozier was firmly of the opinion that sociologists had a role to play in society, and that to be useful and effective, their role should not be to criticize or stir up opposition, but rather to produce knowledge and, on the basis of that knowledge, to help bring about change. In the 1960s and 1970s, when protest movements were common—not just in 1968, but also in the years that followed—and French sociology was dominated by the analysis of social classes and social reproduction, this position was often criticized. In the 1960s, he attended meetings of the Groupe Esprit and the Club Jean Moulin, where he rubbed shoulders with young civil servants involved in political and administrative decision-making; in the 1970s, he was a member of a commission on secondary education, an advisor to Alain Peyrefitte when he was Minister for Administrative Reform, and a member of the Trilateral Commission [26]; he attended meetings with the then Prime Minister Raymond Barre, and took part in the Innovation Mission created by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing; finally, in the 1980s, he conducted surveys for the Institut de l’Entreprise. [27] All of these activities were part and parcel of Michel Crozier’s work as a sociologist. He believed that it was more useful to act within such bodies or places of power than to oppose them or refuse to participate in them. However, many of his colleagues at the time saw this not as a form of commitment, but as compromise, or even collusion with those in power.

Yet Michel Crozier never regretted the form of commitment he had chosen, even if he sometimes lamented that it had not always been successful. For example, Antoine Prost’s report following the Committee of Wise Men on secondary education came to nothing; the publication of the book resulting from the Trilateral Commission went unnoticed; and, under Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency, Crozier failed to make the case that innovation lay in quality and service activities. In short, participation is not always enough to make one’s voice heard.

Michel Crozier’s commitment to society was undoubtedly influenced by his experiences in the United States. His numerous visits to American universities (those already mentioned, followed by a year at Harvard in 1970—he turned down the offer of a permanent position there—and again at Harvard ten years later, then regularly at Irvine in the 1980s) gave him the opportunity to forge links with the great American intellectuals of the time (Marty Lipset, Stanley Hoffman, Albert Hirschmann, James March, to name a few), as well as doctoral students from these institutions who went on to become important policy-makers, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński, and academics who held high-level positions in the federal government, such as Richard Neustadt, assistant dean of the Littauer school at Harvard after serving as an advisor to Truman, and McGeorge Bundy, a dean at Harvard before becoming US national security advisor. Without a doubt, the permeability between academic careers and top-level decision-making positions in the United States shaped Michel Crozier’s notions of commitment.

A scientific and educational entrepreneur

Michel Crozier’s action-oriented approach should not, however, detract from his tireless dedication as a scientific and educational entrepreneur.

For he was indeed an entrepreneur, in more ways than one. First, in 1958, he co-founded the journal Sociologie du Travail with Jean-Daniel Reynaud, Alain Touraine and Jean-René Tréanton, a publication that will soon celebrate its seventieth anniversary. Then, in 1960, he co-founded the European Journal of Sociology with Raymond Aron, Thomas Bottomore, Ralf Dahrendorf and Éric de Dampierre. This journal, too, is still going strong.

He also worked tirelessly to build working groups; from the very start of his career, he sought to create a group of associates with whom he could pursue his investigations. He certainly maintained a rather mandarin approach to the management of this collective, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, when all the people working with him were involved in exploring the local politico-administrative system, which—because he was able to bring together researchers of great intellectual stature [28]—led to some tension over the individual authorship of the conclusions they had collectively reached. In the 1980s, when he was due to retire and hand over the management of the CSO, Michel Crozier was less involved in his role as “boss,” but he remained the tutelary figure of the research laboratory. His chief concern was that the CSO and the French school of organizational sociology should not disappear when he retired. He was therefore careful to ensure that the CSO would survive and that the collective enterprise he had helped to build would continue. This surely explains why the CSO did not break up once Michel Crozier left, and why this research center is still going strong almost forty years later.

In addition to being a scientific entrepreneur, Michel Crozier was also a pedagogical entrepreneur through his involvement in training the next generation of researchers, with the aim of disseminating his approach, his “investigative skills” and his analyses both within the academic world (by training students and doctoral candidates) and outside it (by training people likely to apply his teachings in government, business, associations, NGOs or political parties).

The goal was not only to pass on knowledge, but also to promote a different conception of sociological training. The DEA degree [29] was therefore not only aimed at training future doctoral candidates, but also at students whose training through research and sociology would prepare them for managerial positions in organizations, or professions focused on transforming organizations. This wide range of outlets at the end of a research-based training program was combined with a broad range of backgrounds among its graduates. The DEA was not only open to students who had studied sociology at university or at the École Normale Supérieure; many of them came from other fields of study, as well as from engineering schools, business schools and political studies institutes, or were returning to their studies after professional experience. The content and format of the courses were also unconventional. For example, the timetable alternated weeks of teaching with weeks of collaborative research and writing, with few courses on sociological theory, but plenty of practical application, experience gained in fieldwork, investment in the literature based on empirical results, and collaborative work. In short, the year was highly atypical in the university environment. The DEA students benefited from a teaching style that was anything but lecture-based, but instead focused on highly interactive teaching, mastering data collection and producing results, rather than on the art of the dissertation.

Equally atypical within the French social sciences was the concept of doctoral training developed by Michel Crozier at the CSO, which still thrives today. In the 1980s, this research center was an anomaly among French social science laboratories: only doctoral students were accepted whose funding was guaranteed by what were then called allocations de recherche (research grants), or by any other permanent funding over a three-year period, enabling them to devote their entire time to their thesis. The two or three newcomers who joined the CSO each year were each given a dedicated work station and encouraged to come to work at the center every day, where they were recognized as full members; they could interact with the whole team on a daily basis and attend the weekly seminar where ongoing research and the work of doctoral students were discussed, and where visiting academics, from René Girard to Eliot Freidson and Bruno Latour, also participated.

Michel Crozier was not just a sociologist of the organizational phenomenon and its effects on societies increasingly produced by organizations. He was also an actor committed to reform, convinced that the knowledge produced by the sociology of organizations could and should be a lever for improving social relations and cooperation; he also stood out as a scientific entrepreneur and pedagogical innovator. As such, he was undeniably one of those intellectuals who, while still part of the French higher education and research system, consistently refused to adhere strictly to its rules and rituals, or to remain confined within it. For him, sociologists’ proper place is in society, not looking down on it; they must take society and the people who make it up as their starting point, in order to study and understand it. He believed that mastering the art of inquiry and being able to draw lessons from the field are essential skills for producing new knowledge and empirically founded theoretical contributions.