LAUSR

I began reading this book when the United Kingdom’s EU referendum campaign was reaching its climax. I’m writing this review nearly two months after a majority of voters (52/48%) voted to quit the EU – although what ‘Brexit’ means in practice remains to be seen and may only become clearer in several years. A book which promises to provide the conceptual and methodological tools required to understand, and maybe even ‘explain’, how and why the global system has become an ‘architecture of collapse’ is sorely needed at the present time. This book is based on the 2014 Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies, jointly sponsored by Oxford University Press and the Said Business School, which Guillen gave in that year and it includes an additional chapter with Sandra Suarez on the ‘Great Recession’. It opens with a broad-ranging introductory chapter on ‘the global system’ in which the author sets out to challenge many of the orthodox assumptions and claims made by mainstream globalization theorists. While agreeing that the global system has become more prone to economic and financial turbulence and crises, Guillen questions the ways in which orthodox modes of theorizing – such as world systems theory, neo-institutionalism and business systems theory – have conceptualized and analysed these developments. However, he is far more positive about Perrow’s analysis of ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow, 1984) because it is built around two key concepts and the dynamic interplay between them – that is, ‘complexity’ and ‘coupling’. In direct contrast to much of mainstream theorizing on the global system, Guillen contends that Perrow’s analysis of ‘normal accidents’ convincingly demonstrates that the global system can be catastrophically overcome by interconnected and accumulating crises which overwhelm the latter’s inbuilt equilibrating mechanisms and stabilizing tendencies. Thus, Perrow’s consistent emphasis on the central role of human agency, elite power and legitimation struggles within and between ruling minorities in shaping both the emergence of and response to ‘crises’ finds a warm reception in Guillen’s text. The latter also philosophically and theoretically aligns himself with Giddens’s ‘structuration theory’ and the crucial explanatory role which it assigns to the ‘dialectic of agency and structure’ as encapsulated in the core ontological assumption that social life is ‘fundamentally recursive and expresses the mutual dependence of structure and agency’ (Giddens, 1979, p. 69). This recombination of Perrow’s theory of normal accidents and Giddens’s structuration theory establishes the conceptual foundations on which Guillen develops his interpretation of the complex interplay between ‘complexity’ and ‘coupling’ at three, interrelated, levels of analysis – ‘nodes’ 674868OSS0010.1177/0170840616674868Organization StudiesBook Review book-review2016