Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
The vacation time of many Quebecers was (again) weighed down by the chaos that affected several airports and airlines. Recent hearings at the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities have identified a number of hiccups, including “communication issues” and “organizational issues”. What can be done to prevent such chaos from happening again? Robert Cooper’s theory of disorganization can provide us with some answers, understand this chaos and offer the beginning of a solution. But let’s first come back to our own experience this summer, which echoes those of thousands of travelers during the holiday season.
It is July 3, 2022. Chaos reigns at Montreal airport. The news on this subject has been scrolling for several weeks already: canceled and delayed flights, lack of staff, passengers without luggage and luggage without passengers, long queues at customs. We have to go to Vienna for an international symposium. Consuelo doesn’t take any risks: she arrives six hours early and goes through security without a problem. A few hours later, Joëlle joins her at the boarding gate. Dany, a prisoner of the one kilometer queue, arrives at the race 20 minutes before boarding time. But we are still together, on time, at the boarding gate.
What will follow after is more difficult to tell: three flights, including ours, boarding through the same door; lines of intersecting passengers; almost inaudible flight delay messages; flight attendants who, leaving the loudspeaker system, shouting instructions in vain; text messages from the airline and the airport informing (more or less) of the delay in boarding; and on the screens, the information on the situations in the Canadian airports unceasingly scrolling. Joëlle thinks she hears her name. She approaches a counter to check and is directed to the boarding gate without being able to notify her colleagues that boarding has begun. Consuelo and Dany are waiting for their turn… which will never come: when we realized that the names resounding, almost inaudible, in the loudspeakers were ours, it was too late. The counter agent and the responsible manager tell us that they can’t do anything. We simply missed our flight.
Indeterminacy of meanings
In 1986, Robert Cooper, a theorist and philosopher of organizations, published an article entitled “ Organization/Disorganization » which will upset the current vision of the organization as a place of production of social stability and as a process of coordination and control of activities. Instead of sticking to the notion of the primacy of order characterizing organizational studies at the time (which still applies today), Cooper proposed to understand organization/disorganization as a mutual process that is explained by the ambiguity of events, itself due to the indeterminacy of meanings.
Basing his reflection on the works of Mauss, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, among others, Cooper maintained that meaning is always deferred, because it escapes the influence of the symbolic: a symbol (for example, a pictogram) does not convey all the meaning attributed to it. Undecidability is therefore inherent in the fact of organizing oneself: not understanding calls for a desire for order and becomes the trigger for coordination, classification, control and systematization allowing the reduction of ambiguity and the generation of (more or less) stable social systems.
Seen thus, the chaos at the airport can be explained by an excess of meanings — contradictory messages, diverse interpretations, multiple channels carrying equivocal messages — specific to any organization, amplified by the growing ambiguity of the situation. In our case, the organization/disorganization stems from the inability to respond to this call for order, ie to put in place coordination and control processes to reduce uncertainty. Here, the “coordinated” character is fundamental: it is not the absence of information, but an overabundance of information with different contents—calls over the loudspeakers and out loud; airport and airline texts, changing queues — which is causing the chaos. However, the flight attendant will tell us: “We did recalls. At least ten. Blaming it on the “receiver”, arguing that the information was transmitted, is the easy explanation. But simply transmitting information is not communicating.
To this, Cooper reminds us that no matter what mechanisms we put in place to organize ourselves (i.e. create order), disorganization (and therefore disorder) is its necessary corollary.
A desire for order that creates disorder
The chaos experienced at the airport illustrates the multiple possible interpretations resulting from an ambiguous situation that we are trying to order. Although there were multiple efforts to bring order to this situation — on the part of passengers, counter agents and managers alike — it must be said that they did not make it possible to deal with the situation (at least from our point of view). The usual markers associated with this context (messages, gates and boarding queues), as well as the strong standardization of roles and behaviors found at the airport (check-in, security checks), have not been sufficient to make the multiplicity and diversity of signs intelligible. Especially since these signs (text messages informing of the delay of the flight, news on the screens) and their combinations invited to continue to wait for boarding. The desire for order has created disorder: instead of providing adequate information, the multiplicity of signs has created other interpretations.
Now the question is whether airports (and other overstretched organizations) are succeeding in creating order and managing the mess it engenders well: are they learning to cobble together creative solutions, or to demonstrate wisdom and listening? Improvements made last fall seemed to indicate so, but the events of December reminded us that organizations can fail to coordinate their activities in an intelligible way, which leads to organizational instability. Although weather conditions and the fact that many employees were on leave partly explain the chaos of the holiday season, the Standing Committee hearings revealed that carriers and managers struggle to put in place coordinated communication systems, synchronized and unambiguous. And with regard to employees, passengers and other organizational actors: will they be able to create respectful and, above all, coordinated relationships, to preserve the collective even when they are isolated?
To put order is to take power
Cooper also explains the always political character of scheduling. Bringing order is an act of power: power, in his words, is the forced transformation of undecidability into decidability. The airport is a space invested with mechanisms of prediction and control, aimed at reducing, fixing and ordering. Under the injunction of security, airports are setting up communication and flow management control systems (of passengers, baggage, information, etc.) that refuse any dissidence.
Passengers must therefore obediently follow the measures put in place, wait without protest in the queues, undergo the inspection of bodies and objects. Any disturbance affecting this mode of scheduling is seen as a threat. Faced with the chaos in the airport, the answer is to tighten the forms of control and to further discipline the passengers, targeted as anxious and unreliable subjects.
We did undergo this check: at our insistence that a solution be offered to us and that we could board the plane, the airport staff threatened to call security. We were escorted outside by the counter agent and security out of the international area and to customer service. Through these gestures and these speeches, we have been assigned a new role, that of anxious, unreliable and therefore potentially dangerous subjects. Resisting was not an option: we bowed our heads, following orders, accepting the shame we were made to bear: we are the only ones guilty of having missed the plane. We were alone despite the crowd.
Thus, in crisis situations, which are likely to become more frequent due to the increasing scarcity of labor and natural disasters amplified by global warming, organizations – whether airports, government agencies responsible for to offer help in the event of a crisis, or even hospitals or schools — must create order by coordinating and prioritizing the multiple messages, and cultivate benevolence to preserve the collective, in order to limit the disorder generated through the coordination efforts necessary for crisis management.
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].