The dominant group, reflecting the imperatives of the particular task that is most critical (to the organization), their own background characteristics (distinctive perspectives based on their training, career lines, and areas of competence) and the unofficial uses to which they put the organization for their own ends.
The operative goals will be shaped by the dominant group, reflecting the imperatives of the particular task area that is most critical, their own background characteristics (distinctive perspectives based upon their training, career lines, and areas of competence) and the unofficial uses to which they put the organization for their own needs.
Organisations are viewed as systems which utilise energy in a patterned, directed effort to alter the condition of basic materials in a predetermined manner.
From one point of view, structure is a part of technology; for example the spread of the bureaucratic form of organization might be said to be the most profound technological innovation in the last 3 or 4 centuries.
Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter “materials” (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.
Two aspects of this work process are of critical importance.
In research terms, the issue is to examine and explain the variations within and among residential institutions.
Executives were closely observed at work at their desks, at staff meetings, while talking with inmates or moving about the grounds and so on, and again in the feedback sessions when we gave them findings.
[People-processing institutions are] a type of social institution in which human beings constitute both the raw materials and the products of organizational work. Although all social institutions are involved in some degree in people-processing activities, the term is properly restricted to those whose primary goal is the shaping, reshaping, removing, overhauling, retooling, reassembling, and recording the physical, psychological, social, legal, or moral aspects of human objects.
Inspection of the questionnaires also indicated that because staff members in the more custodial institutions were more willing to use negative sanctions they probably were confronted with less disruptive behavior, since the inmates recognized the costs of acting as they felt.
Frequent scheduling of mass activities in the company of other inmates, group punishment, and administering physical punishment before groups of inmates enhance the probability that inmates identify strongly with one another against staff. When, in addition, staff maintain domineering authority relationships and considerable social dishance, inmates further perceive themselves as members of a group opposed to staff, and divergent interests between these groups are more fully recognized
Organizations are seen primarily as systems for getting work done, for applying techniques to the problem of altering raw materials - whether the materials be people, symbols or things.
Chapter Five deals with the messiest problem of all— but the one to which all analytical roads should lead : the nature of organizational goals and the strategies used to achieve them.
The structural viewpoint considers the roles people play, rather than the nature of the personalities in these roles. It deals with the structures in which roles are performed— the relationship of groups to each other, such as sales and production, and the degree of centralization or decentralization.
People's attitudes are shaped at least as much by the organization in which they work as by their pre-existing attitudes.
Apparent leadership problems are often problems of organizational structure.
Once a definition is embedded in a program, the opinions of personnel who remain at the institution become congruent with it.
Bureaucracy is a dirty word, both to the average person and to many specialists on organizations. It suggests rigid rules and regulations, a hierarchy of offices, narrow specialization of personnel, an abundance of offices or units which can hamstring those who want to get things done, impersonality, resistance to change.
A great deal of organizational effort is exerted to control the effects of extra-organizational influence:; upon personnel. Daily, people come contaminated into the organization... Many of the irritating aspects of organizational structure] are designed to control these sources of contamination.
For our purposes then, the bureaucratic model refers to an organization which attempts to control extra-organizational influences (stemming from the characteristics of personnel and changes in the environment) through the creation of specialized (staff) positions and through such rules and devices as regulations and categorization.
Routine tasks... are well-established techniques which are sure to work, and these are applied to essentially similar raw materials, That is, there is little uncertainty about methods and little variety or change in the tasks that must be performed.
Nonroutine tasks:... There are few well-established techniques; there is little certainty about methods, or whether or not they will work. But it also means that there may be a variety of different task to perform, in the sense that raw materials are not standardized, or orders for customers ask for many different or custom-made products.
Most social scientists consider the non-bureaucratic, or nonroutine organization to be good and the bureaucratic or routine organization to be bad (it impedes progress, is old- fashioned, is hard on its employees, etc.). But this judgment is debatable.
While [bureaucratic] solutions have been frequently criticized by those within and without the organization, no alternative way has been found to cope with the problem of organizing large numbers of people to produce goods and services efficiently.
The concept of organizational goals, like the concepts of power, authority, or leadership, has been unusually resistant to precise, unambiguous definition. Yet a definition of goals is necessary and unavoidable in organizational analysis. Organizations are established to do something; they perform work directed toward some end.
Organization theory...has been altogether too accommodating to organizations and their power.
People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization.
Without this form of social technology, the industrialized countries of the West could not have reached the heights of extravagance, wealth and pollution that they currently enjoy.
Particularism means that irrelevant criteria like e.g. only relatives of the boss have a chance at top positions, in contrast to universalistic criteria like e.g. competences is all that counts, are employed in choosing employees... The particularistic criteria are likely to be negatively related to performance.
Barnard comes close to joining Roethlisberger and Dickson in their assumption that management behavior is mainly rational and workers' behavior nonrational.
People in these fields no longer agree that such things as norms, values, and personality really exist or account for much; these concepts may only give a false sense of order to a world that both the academic and the person in the street desperately want to order. Sociology, too, is having some difficulty swallowing the simple, obvious proposition that attitudes predict behavior. (The proposition that morale predicts productivity is just one specification of this.)
It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate
The vast proportion of the activity in organizations goes on without personal directives and supervision – and even without written rules – and sometimes in permitted violation of the rules.
Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.
As with all theories, we can learn something from agency theory and transaction-costs economics, since they emphasize something others hide. But as with all theories, they also distort; in fact, I will argue that their distortions outweigh the value of what they highlight.
From the beginning, the forces of light and the forces of darkness have polarized the field of organizational analysis, and the struggle has been protracted and inconclusive. The forces of darkness have been represented by the mechanical school of organizational theory — those who treat the organization as a machine. This school characterizes organizations in terms o£ such things as:
The burning cry in all organizations is for “good leadership,” but we have learned that beyond a threshold level of adequacy it is extremely difficult to know what good leadership is.
I once believed that if organizations had a better fit between their technology and their structure, they would be more efficient and thus more profitable.
This article [entitled A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations], was one of three independent statements in 1967 of what came to be called "contingency theory." It held that the structure of an organization depends upon (is ‘contingent’ upon) the kind of task performed, rather than upon some universal principles that apply to all organizations. The notion was in the wind at the time.
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued?
As an organizational sociologist, I was interested in the system characteristics of large accidents, but the discipline also made me aware of the organizational genesis of male-made disasters.
The essence of the normal accident [is] the interaction of multiple failures that are not in a direct operational sequence.
Most normal accidents have a significant degree of incomprehensibility.
The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)
Organizational theorists, at least since the pioneering work of Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Joan Woodward, 1965 and others in what came to be called the contingency school, have recognized that centralization is appropriate for organizations with routine tasks, and decentralization for those with nonroutine tasks. For an early statement see Perrow 1967, and Lawrence and Lorch, 1967.
It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.
The power structure will generally dictate the operative goals of the organization.
For many purposes of organizational analysis technology might not be an independent variable but a dependent one.
In a modern society, where large organizations have acquired unprecedented importance, social scientists have increasingly sought to understand the nature of organizational goals - what they are, what shapes or determines them, what their impact is upon the environment, and how they change.
Product of complex interactions within and between the organization’s social structure, leadership groups and environment. ... They are never static but subject to continual pressure and changes over time.
Covers the history and tradition, the precedents and established commitments involved in all past action. These limit, though not determine, the present actions that any one group may take. If any single thing deserved the designation “the institution” or “the hospital” it would be this.”
What do individuals or groups of similarly hope to gain from participation in the affairs of the organization? Or, to use an awkward phrase we shall reiterate frequently, what are the uses to which they put the organisation?
Unambiguous pursuit of official goals is not likely to be common.
Where and how will official goals be subverted?
Official goals are the general purposes of the organization as put forth in the charter, annual reports, public statements... Official goals are purposely vague and general and do not indicate two major factors which influence organizational behavior: the host of decisions that must be made among alternative ways of achieving official goals, and the priority of multiple goals and the many unofficial goals pursued by groups within the organization.
Operative goals designate the ends sought through the actual operating policies of the organization; they tell us what the organization actually is trying to do, regardless of what the official goals say are the aims.