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On behalf of EGOS, I am proud to announce that Johan P. Olsen has
accepted to become an Honorary Member of EGOS.
Johan Olsen was born in 1939 in Tromso, in the northern part of
Norway. He started his professional career as a journalist and
reporter. This may explain why he is such a fast writer and why he
is so open to empirical observation. He graduated in political
science at the university of Oslo in 1967. He received a doctoral
degree from the university of Bergen in 1971. Norway already then
was ranking high in the field of political science with scholars
such as Stein Rokkan or Francesco Kjellberg, just to name a few.
Johan Olsen has carried on this tradition of excellence further
while suggesting a new agenda often referred to as the Bergen
approach. [1]
At the end of the 1960s, he spent one year at the University of
California, Irvine. He started his academic career as a junior
professor at the institute of sociology in Bergen. One year later he
was promoted to associate professor, and four years later, to full
professor. He launched a major research program in the 1970s on the
study of the distribution of power and the political-administrative
system in Norway. This project became so influential that a similar
program about power and democracy was launched later on in Sweden.
Johan Olsen became of one its leaders. He left Bergen in the mid
1990s to join the university of Oslo.
In 2007, Johan Olsen has become an Emeritus Professor. He keeps
playing a leading role within the ARENA project he had been the
acting director of. ARENA is the 'Advanced Research on the
Europeanization of the Nation-State', a basic research program under
the Research Council of Norway set up in 1993.
Johan Olsen has two daughters and he is very fond of them. While
their father had left the periphery, namely Tromso, heading to the
center, namely Bergen and then Oslo, but stopping short of the
bordure of the European Union and Brussels, one of his daughters
made the next step. Heidi is now representing Norway in negotiations
with the European Union.
EGOSians should feel respect and humility when looking at the
achievements and contributions made during Johan’s forty years of
academic career. When reading the honors listed in his curriculum
vitae, one may wonder what difference one more distinction such as
the EGOS Honorary Membership may add. There is one thing that is
crystal clear: Johan Olsen is a living example of EGOS core values
at work. He provides a model to imitate.
Johan has strong local cultural and ethical roots. At the same
time, he is widely open to international cooperation and his
contributions handle issues that are universal. The list of
contributors to the Festschrift edited in his honor [2]
looks like a Who's Who.
One of his most influential papers in the field of organization
theory remains the co-authored article on the garbage can theory of
choice [3]. It is amazing to know that Johan is a very
disciplined and strategically thinking scholar – hiding behind a
very relaxed and disarmingly friendly attitude. Also he is a
Norwegian and a typical one of the kind. Nobody would have imagined
that a typical Norwegian could be a very strong inspirational force
behind the garbage can model. But he was!
A classic book, co-authored again with James March, expanded the
garbage can model and its implications [4]. His
collaboration with the first honorary member of EGOS went on and on,
with more books and papers, but also with network building
initiatives. The Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research
which research base was at Stanford University and welcomed around
250 scholars and doctoral students became quite influential world
wide.
March and Olsen, Olsen and March, are a rather unique case of
twin brotherhood in science. Their cooperation is the outcome of an
encounter between persons who fight with stubbornness against ideas
and perspectives that oversimplify when not ignore organizations as
complex systems and collective action as socially embedded
configurations. New Public Management, rational choice, agency
theory, the so-called sociological institutionalism, just to name a
few examples of scientific hyper-deterministic models, have faced
tough times debating with the widely known paradigm called new
institutionalism [5].
Johan Olsen is a soloist as well a duettist. Whatever the way he
makes science and authors publications, he ranks at the top. Why?
Because Johan Olsen is not only one more organizational theorist
building a reputation rent out of a very narrow niche, he is a
social scientist at large. Organization theories have to refer to
wider social science agendas and knowledge. They do not make sense
just as such, as mere isolated islands.
Johan Olsen ignores knowledge silos. Political science may have
been his initial domaine, he joined an institute of sociology. Later
he became a professor in public administration and organization
theory. He played a key role in the study of public administration
not merely as formal organizations but as key contributors to
policy-making processes and outcomes. Organizations, policies and
polities have to be treated as interlinked dynamic phenomena.
Johan Olsen has paved the way for a second generation of
organization science and theory.
A pioneering generation gathered disciples influenced by giants
such as Max Weber or Roberto Michels. A common scientific program
dominated organizational sociology between the 1940s and the early
1970s. Most of the names of its contributors are familiar: Peter
Blau, Michel Crozier, Alvin Gouldner, Martin Lipset, Charles Perrow,
Philip Selznick, just to mention a few. Their agenda dealt with
bureaucracy, more precisely with the way central public agencies
could penetrate society. It linked its emergence and its impacts
with modern state building, with welfare policies, with the nation
as a common cultural reference, with mass representative democracy.
Many of its contributors, it must be added, were influenced by
ideological backgrounds such as trotzkyism or anarchism. They cared
about elitism, technocracy, domination, etc.
A second generation has explored a different agenda, giving
attention to two observations. Most policies fail because
bureaucratization as a control and delivery pattern fails. Welfare
do-gooders deliver poorly what they had promised to solve. At the
same time mechanisms such as market selection or selfish opportunism
do not suffice to handle public and private issues, to induce
integration and legitimacy. Organizations as social and political
constructs should therefore be linked to questions about
transnational interdependencies when no state pattern exists, about
policy-making when problems are messy to be handled and not
consensually identified, about supra and infra national polities
when not established public institutions exist, about participation
and governance when voting and election do not suffice to enforce
democracy, and to build a sustainable social fabric.
Johan Olsen has played a major and pioneering role in shaping
this perspective. The agenda as set up by giants such as Harold
Lasswell and Robert Dahl in the mid-20th century about power and
democracy had to be revisited and enriched. Organization theory and
policy-making studies should provide fruitful sources for political
research purposes.
Johan Olsen delivers an encouraging message about the future of
organization, organized and organizing as relevant knowledge domains,
provided that organization theory as an academic field is explicitly
linked to the understanding of contemporary societies, not just to
ad hoc management purposes or to selfish academic rhetorics. They
suggest ways and openings to build broader Verstehen frameworks
about polity, society and economy.
At the same time Johan Olsen keeps hammering that organization
scholars should beware of arrogance. Arrogance in this case means
that organization theory is postulated to be self-sufficient. The
fact is obvious: some scholars widely referred to by organization
sciences express an ambition to supply alternative general theory
perspectives. The warning expressed by Johan Olsen is quite
straightforward. Do not ignore the limits and relativity of
organizational knowledge. Do not overemphasize the importance of
meso phenomena while discarding macro as well as micro levels as
specific structures, as aggregation, conflict and stratification
factors of their own. Johan Olsen does not ignore issues such as
action, legitimacy, government, state, nation, publicness, social
movements, ideologies, etc. They are part of the core agenda in
political science. He does not use and abuse of organization models
as mere hammers looking for societal nails [6]. Neither does
he ignore valid past contributions made by past scholars (i.e.
pre-internet age contributions).
Johan Olsen is neither a technocrat nor an ideologue, neither a
hyper-relativist theorist nor a post-modernist addict. Scientific
knowledge should be linked to facts and their interpretation. He
combines two distinctive characteristics. Science grounded knowledge
matters. He cares very much about implications of his work for
societal and civic purposes. At the same time he has strong values
and opinions about what is good or desirable in life. They have
certainly played a strong role in his association with scholars such
as James March. The Bergen approach, for instance, is driven by a
communal conception of democratic governance.
During the second part of his professional career he has
allocated a lot attention to democracy and to Europe. Both are
strongly linked in his mind. One of his recent books called 'Europe
in Search of Political Order' [7] should attract attention.
Even if some of his colleagues may feel that Europe remains strongly
influenced by nation-state rooted stakes and forces, the essay by
Johan Olsen makes a lot of sense empirically.
A country such as Norway, that does not belong to the European
Union, has generated one of the most respected thinkers and
influential observers of the way our future governance system gets
built up and should be designed. Some years ago, Johan and I had
joined a task force of scholars who were supposed to give ideas to a
newly elected president of the European Commission. Johan Olsen was
one of the few academics our Brussels hosts gave credit to.
Johan Olsen is in search for theoretical foundations to help
citizens who need it and for administrative reforms that generate
dynamics of success and trust. At the same time he remains very
cautious. Academically generated knowledge can only provide
fragmented evidence and relative truth. Holistic visions are
illusions. The relevance of 'a priori assumptions about a single,
universal set of behavioral logics, organizational arrangements, and
dynamics of change is an empirical question' [8]. The world
is far too complex, as it probably was the case yesterday and as it
certainly is the case now.
So, once again, Johan, one of your many scientific communities
feels honored to have you as an Honorary Member. EGOS values owe you
so much. You remind us that they make a lot of sense for the coming
years.
Jean-Claude Thoenig
References
[1] Olsen, Johan P. (2007): 'Organization Theory, Public
Administration, Democratic Governance', Nordiske
Organisasjons-Studier, 1
[2] Egeberg, Morten and Per Laegreid (eds.) (1999): Organizing
Political Institutions. Scandinavian University Press
[3] Cohen, Michael D., James D. March and Johan P. Olson (1972): 'Carbage
Can Model of Organizational Choice', Administrative Science
Quarterly, 1
[4] March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen (1976): Ambiguity and
Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Universitetsforlaget
[5] March, James G. and Johan P. Olsen (1984): 'The New
Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life',
American Political Science Review, 78
[6] Olsen, Johan P. (1991): 'Political Science and Organization
Theory. Parallel Agendas but Mutual Disregard'. In: Roland M. Czada
and Adrienne Windhoff-Héritier (eds.): Political Choice.
Institutions, Rules, and the Limits of Rationality. Frankfurt
a.M.: Campus
[7] Olsen, Johan P. (2007): Europe in Search of Political Order.
An institutional perspective on unity/diversity, citizens/their
helpers, democratic design/historical drift, and the co-existence of
orders. Oxford: Oxford University Press
[8] Olsen, Johan P.: 'Citizens, Public Administration and the Search
for Theoretical Foundations', The 2003 John Gaus Lecture,
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