The Threads of Organisations : Theories
Because Organisations are different creatures to different people ,organisation are defined according to the contexts and perspectives peculiar to the person doing the defining.Nevertheless,we can at least posit certain characteristics that are common in all organisations.
Organisations:
- are purposeful,complex human collectivists
- are characteristic by secondary (or impersonal) relationships
- have specialized and limited goals
- are characterized by sustained cooperative activity
- are integrated within a larger social system
- provide services and products to their environment and
- are dependent upon exchanges with their environment.
Organisation theorists using essentially this list of characteristics but stressing different items in it,have produced a vast body of literature on the nature of organisation.This literature can be viewed as a long lanyard plaited of two yarns,each with its own threads.
The Closed Model of Organisations
Our first yarn is the closed model of organisations ,which goes by many names.Bureaucratic ,hierarchical ,formal,rational and mechanistic are some of them.
Characteristic of the closed Model of Organisations
We rely on a classic analysis in listing the principal features of the closed model of organisations
- Routine task occur in stable conditions
- task specialization(ie..a division of labor) is central.
- Means (or the proper way to do job) are emphasized.
- Conflict within the organisation is adjudicated from the top.
- "Responsibility" or (what one is supposed to do,one's formal job description is emphasized.
- One's primary sense of responsibility and loyalty is to the bureaucratic sub unit to which one is assigned (such as accounting department).
- The organisation is perceived as a hierarchy structure(ie ..the structure looks like a pyramid).
- knowledge is inclusive only at the top of the hierarchy (in other words,only the chief executive knows everything).
- Interaction between people in the organisation tends to be vertical (ie..one takes orders from above and transmits orders below),but not horizontal.
- The style of interaction is directed towards obedience,command, and clear super-ordinate/sub-ordinate relationships,
- Loyalty and obedience to one's surprise and the organisation generally are emphasized.
- Prestige is "internalized" that is personal status in the organisation is determined largely by one's formal office and rank.
So runs our closed model of organisations.And its is just that-a model.No organisation meets all twelve of its features in practice.Among organisation that are widely known,the department of Defense likely comes closet to accomplishing the requisites of the closed model,but the Pentagon's exception to the model are obvious ,such as highly unstable conditions during wartime.
There are at-least three theoretical threads that have thrived within the closed model's framework.
Bureaucratic Theory
The earliest school of the closed model is that of bureaucratic theory ,or the study of the impersonal organisation,execution and enforcement of legal rules in organization. Its best known representation is Max Weber,a remarkable German sociologist who wrote around the turn of the twentieth century. Although "bureaucracy" is common in all sectors ,Weber cast his theory of bureaucracy squarely are
hierarchy
promotion based on professional merit and skill
the development of a career service
reliance on and use of rules and regulations and
personality of relationships and bureaucracy and with their clientele.
To Weber, an impersonal, rule abiding,efficient,merit based career service provided the surest way of fulfilling the public interest in the face of a politically fragmented Germany and an arrogant,powerful,yet somewhat silly Junker c;ass.Weber,in large sense, was not anti-humanist in his thinking as has been alleged,but the effects of the bureaucracy that he so loudly touted could be ,both to the citizens who were governed by the bureaucrats and to the bureaucrats themselves.
Weber's rigidly rational theory was warmly welcomed by the first public administrationist.,who embraced it as an erudite justification of their values,all of which shared an abhorrence with messy politics, Woodrow Wilson closest adviser colonel Edward House,anonymously wrote a novel that memorably express this revulsion.
In it,the president is replaced by an omnipotent "Administrator of the Republic" who resides in a monastic barracks,spurning the distractive fripperies of the White House, and who ends the odious "rule of the bosses." Congress is disbanded in favor creating numerous "boards", each composed of five neutral experts who are charged with reforming the courts,taxes,railroads ,"the unsanitary custom of burial in cemeteries" and anything else that could benefit from a dose of the administrators common sense-in other words ,just about everything.(This perspective remains remarkably persistent;nearly a third of American think that policy-making should be shorn from elected officials and turned over to "non-elected experts".
Another rivulet of research in the closed model is scientific management, which is the analysis of work flow processes as the means of raising organisational productivity.Scientific management refers to what are more popularly known as time motion studies ; It flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century and remains in use today in industry.
Scientific management overriding concern is to increase production,and it does this by making human beings as efficient as,and more like,machines.To quote one of the school's founders,"it si absolutely necessary for every man in an organisation to become one of a train of gear wheels."
Key representatives of the scientific management include Fredrick Taylor(who gave this school its name with his 1911 volume, Principles of Scientific Management), and Frank and Lillian Giberth. The person as machine perspective,replete with all its discomfiting overtones,is on clear display in Taylor's writings.A notorious example is Taylor declared to be"Stupid...phlegmatic...(and)more nearly resembles in his mental make up the ox than any other type".
After Taylor analyzed Schmidt's physical movements,he ordered him to change how he moved his body and, as a result of these"scientific" alterations,Schimidt's production went up from twelve and a half tons of pig-iron hauled per day to forty seven tons.
Similarly the Gilberths developed the concept of the"therblig" each one of which represented a category of 18 basic human motions-all physical activity fell into a therblig class of one type or another.(The scientific management crowd rarely was constrained by modesty,false or otherwise;try reading therblig backward.)
The person as machine perspective has a distasteful aura.People are not machines.Before dismissing the scientific managers as exploiters of the working class,however keep in mind that efficiency can serve humane ends as well as any other,and this aspect sometimes is overlooked by critics.Frank Gilberth,for example,applied his therbligs to surgery techniques in hospitals,and the sharply ordered "Scalp!Sponge!" slapped into a surgeon's palm by a hypereffcient nurse is a direct result of Gilberth's operating room studies.Prior to Gilberth's analysis,surgeons rustled around for their own instruments with one hand,evidently holding open the incisions with the other.
Frank Gilberth'w wife ,Lillian held a professorship at Purdue University that was split between its schools of management and Home Economics and gave us kitchen islands,rolling kitchen carts,and cookery's work triangle".As "the mother of scientific management(Taylor is the father of scientific management"-it says so on his tomb stone),she was featured on a U.S.postage stamp,advised six presidents of the united states,and bore Frank,at his request,six boys and six girls-two of whom wrote Cheaper by the Dozen, rollicking account of life in scientifically managed household.
A deeper criticism of scientific management is that "there was almost no science to it"Taylor's Schmidt was likely fictional , his methodologies were idiosyncratic at best,and he never published the actual data on which his theory was based,Whether "Speedy taylor"
as he was called , was "a shameless fraud is matter of of some debate,but not ,it must be said much." Taylor's sometimes brutal applications of his theory (the Gilberths were much more humane)brought about strikes by exhausted workers and a hostile congressional investigation.(Perhaps it should give us pause that Taylor thought public administration to be "on the whole good".
Nevertheless the impact of scientific management was stunning.Taylor was central in organizing America's first graduate school to offer a degree in business (at Harvard 1908); his theories underlay the Soviet Union's First five year applications by Henry Ford,who," following Speedy Taylor's example,"measured his workers movement on the assembly line with a stopwatch." "the world of management"-including public management where Taylor's ghost may still haunt the halls of government"-remains deeply Taylorism in its foundations".
Our final literature of the closed model is administrative management.Administrative management also called generic management ,is the discovery and application of universal,scientific,administrative principles that can improve any organisation's efficiency and effectiveness.Unfortunately for this school, as we explained in Chapter 2,there are no universal,scientific,administrative principles,but some of its adherents nevertheless made some contributions of consequence.
The scholars of administrative management devoted their energies to the discovery of managerial principles that worked in any and all institutional settings -from corporations and clubs,to governments and gulags-and in any and all cultural contexts-from Bostons and Botswana,to Paris and Patagonia.Writers in this stream usually offered up very specific principles of administration:The public administration scholars ,Luther Gullick and Lyndall Urwick listed seven principles;James D Mooney and Aln C. Reiley,in their aptly tittled and influencing work,The Principles of Organisations,found four;another Henry Fayol unearthed fourteen.Among the primer scholars in the management tradition,Mary Parker Follet was one of the few who fudged when it come to enumerating principles of administration,but then she was usually ahead of her time,perhaps because her intellectual roots were deeply planted in public administration.
With the emergence of administration management , a hint surfaced that presaged a revolution in organisation theory,one that ultimately would bluntly question a foundation of its two theoretical predecessors,bureaucratic theory and scientific management.that hint was that underlings and toilers in organisation conceivably might have minds of their own.
It was not much of an inkling,but it is intimated,if perversely,in Mooney and Reiley's Contention that the "indoctrination" of workers is vital to well managed organisations;they thought that the catholic church had done a simply swell job of indoctrination over the preceding 2000 years.the idea that workers could think is much more apparent in Follett's writing who was suggesting power sharing,stakeholder theory,and team building in the 1920s!
Follet's ideas (as channeled through W.Edwards Deming,of total Quality management fame) were implemented by Japanese automakers,who applied the, with enormous success,at least up to a point.Japan's Toyota ,after faithfully following Follet's philosophy for more than fifty years,abandoned it in favor of overtaking General Motors as the globe's biggest automaker(which it did) by embracing "disastrous policies adopted after 2000,when top management's thinking changed in a direction sharply that,while consistent with that of most other western companies,would never have been tolerated at Toyota's global rolling recalls in 2010 and 2011 to correct safety issues in more than fourteen million vehicles,its largest number ever.(An unprecedented,ten month federal investigation found no electronics problems,but did discover two mechanical malfunctions involving unanticipated acceleration. As Follet exemplifies,the administrative management writers were among the first to express a dawning recognition that subordinated were people(like managers)and could think (almost like managers).This breakthrough provided a basis for organisation theory's next paradigm,the open model.
THE OPEN MODEL OF ORGANISATIONS
As with the closed model the open model goes by many names. Collegial,competitive,free market informal,natural and organic are some of them.
The origins of the open model actually precede those of the closed model by more than a century and a half and can be traced to Count Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon,the brilliant French social thinker,and to his protege Auguste Comte,the "father of sociology.Partly as a reaction to the social stultification of the last days of the French kings and the explosiveness of the reluctant Revolution,Saint-Simon and later Comre,Speculated on what the administration of the future would be like.They thought that technology would spawn new professions;that administrators would be appointed on the basis of skill rather than heredity;and the organisation would be created spontaneously ,evolve "naturally",and be a liberating force for humanity.
hierarchy
promotion based on professional merit and skill
the development of a career service
reliance on and use of rules and regulations and
personality of relationships and bureaucracy and with their clientele.
To Weber, an impersonal, rule abiding,efficient,merit based career service provided the surest way of fulfilling the public interest in the face of a politically fragmented Germany and an arrogant,powerful,yet somewhat silly Junker c;ass.Weber,in large sense, was not anti-humanist in his thinking as has been alleged,but the effects of the bureaucracy that he so loudly touted could be ,both to the citizens who were governed by the bureaucrats and to the bureaucrats themselves.
Weber's rigidly rational theory was warmly welcomed by the first public administrationist.,who embraced it as an erudite justification of their values,all of which shared an abhorrence with messy politics, Woodrow Wilson closest adviser colonel Edward House,anonymously wrote a novel that memorably express this revulsion.
In it,the president is replaced by an omnipotent "Administrator of the Republic" who resides in a monastic barracks,spurning the distractive fripperies of the White House, and who ends the odious "rule of the bosses." Congress is disbanded in favor creating numerous "boards", each composed of five neutral experts who are charged with reforming the courts,taxes,railroads ,"the unsanitary custom of burial in cemeteries" and anything else that could benefit from a dose of the administrators common sense-in other words ,just about everything.(This perspective remains remarkably persistent;nearly a third of American think that policy-making should be shorn from elected officials and turned over to "non-elected experts".
Scientific Management
Workers as "Gear Wheels"
Scientific management overriding concern is to increase production,and it does this by making human beings as efficient as,and more like,machines.To quote one of the school's founders,"it si absolutely necessary for every man in an organisation to become one of a train of gear wheels."Key representatives of the scientific management include Fredrick Taylor(who gave this school its name with his 1911 volume, Principles of Scientific Management), and Frank and Lillian Giberth. The person as machine perspective,replete with all its discomfiting overtones,is on clear display in Taylor's writings.A notorious example is Taylor declared to be"Stupid...phlegmatic...(and)more nearly resembles in his mental make up the ox than any other type".
After Taylor analyzed Schmidt's physical movements,he ordered him to change how he moved his body and, as a result of these"scientific" alterations,Schimidt's production went up from twelve and a half tons of pig-iron hauled per day to forty seven tons.
Similarly the Gilberths developed the concept of the"therblig" each one of which represented a category of 18 basic human motions-all physical activity fell into a therblig class of one type or another.(The scientific management crowd rarely was constrained by modesty,false or otherwise;try reading therblig backward.)
The person as machine perspective has a distasteful aura.People are not machines.Before dismissing the scientific managers as exploiters of the working class,however keep in mind that efficiency can serve humane ends as well as any other,and this aspect sometimes is overlooked by critics.Frank Gilberth,for example,applied his therbligs to surgery techniques in hospitals,and the sharply ordered "Scalp!Sponge!" slapped into a surgeon's palm by a hypereffcient nurse is a direct result of Gilberth's operating room studies.Prior to Gilberth's analysis,surgeons rustled around for their own instruments with one hand,evidently holding open the incisions with the other.
Frank Gilberth'w wife ,Lillian held a professorship at Purdue University that was split between its schools of management and Home Economics and gave us kitchen islands,rolling kitchen carts,and cookery's work triangle".As "the mother of scientific management(Taylor is the father of scientific management"-it says so on his tomb stone),she was featured on a U.S.postage stamp,advised six presidents of the united states,and bore Frank,at his request,six boys and six girls-two of whom wrote Cheaper by the Dozen, rollicking account of life in scientifically managed household.
The Lasting Impact of a Fraud?-
A deeper criticism of scientific management is that "there was almost no science to it"Taylor's Schmidt was likely fictional , his methodologies were idiosyncratic at best,and he never published the actual data on which his theory was based,Whether "Speedy taylor"
as he was called , was "a shameless fraud is matter of of some debate,but not ,it must be said much." Taylor's sometimes brutal applications of his theory (the Gilberths were much more humane)brought about strikes by exhausted workers and a hostile congressional investigation.(Perhaps it should give us pause that Taylor thought public administration to be "on the whole good".
Nevertheless the impact of scientific management was stunning.Taylor was central in organizing America's first graduate school to offer a degree in business (at Harvard 1908); his theories underlay the Soviet Union's First five year applications by Henry Ford,who," following Speedy Taylor's example,"measured his workers movement on the assembly line with a stopwatch." "the world of management"-including public management where Taylor's ghost may still haunt the halls of government"-remains deeply Taylorism in its foundations".
Administrative Management
Our final literature of the closed model is administrative management.Administrative management also called generic management ,is the discovery and application of universal,scientific,administrative principles that can improve any organisation's efficiency and effectiveness.Unfortunately for this school, as we explained in Chapter 2,there are no universal,scientific,administrative principles,but some of its adherents nevertheless made some contributions of consequence.
The scholars of administrative management devoted their energies to the discovery of managerial principles that worked in any and all institutional settings -from corporations and clubs,to governments and gulags-and in any and all cultural contexts-from Bostons and Botswana,to Paris and Patagonia.Writers in this stream usually offered up very specific principles of administration:The public administration scholars ,Luther Gullick and Lyndall Urwick listed seven principles;James D Mooney and Aln C. Reiley,in their aptly tittled and influencing work,The Principles of Organisations,found four;another Henry Fayol unearthed fourteen.Among the primer scholars in the management tradition,Mary Parker Follet was one of the few who fudged when it come to enumerating principles of administration,but then she was usually ahead of her time,perhaps because her intellectual roots were deeply planted in public administration.
With the emergence of administration management , a hint surfaced that presaged a revolution in organisation theory,one that ultimately would bluntly question a foundation of its two theoretical predecessors,bureaucratic theory and scientific management.that hint was that underlings and toilers in organisation conceivably might have minds of their own.
It was not much of an inkling,but it is intimated,if perversely,in Mooney and Reiley's Contention that the "indoctrination" of workers is vital to well managed organisations;they thought that the catholic church had done a simply swell job of indoctrination over the preceding 2000 years.the idea that workers could think is much more apparent in Follett's writing who was suggesting power sharing,stakeholder theory,and team building in the 1920s!
Follet's ideas (as channeled through W.Edwards Deming,of total Quality management fame) were implemented by Japanese automakers,who applied the, with enormous success,at least up to a point.Japan's Toyota ,after faithfully following Follet's philosophy for more than fifty years,abandoned it in favor of overtaking General Motors as the globe's biggest automaker(which it did) by embracing "disastrous policies adopted after 2000,when top management's thinking changed in a direction sharply that,while consistent with that of most other western companies,would never have been tolerated at Toyota's global rolling recalls in 2010 and 2011 to correct safety issues in more than fourteen million vehicles,its largest number ever.(An unprecedented,ten month federal investigation found no electronics problems,but did discover two mechanical malfunctions involving unanticipated acceleration. As Follet exemplifies,the administrative management writers were among the first to express a dawning recognition that subordinated were people(like managers)and could think (almost like managers).This breakthrough provided a basis for organisation theory's next paradigm,the open model.
THE OPEN MODEL OF ORGANISATIONS
As with the closed model the open model goes by many names. Collegial,competitive,free market informal,natural and organic are some of them.
The origins of the open model actually precede those of the closed model by more than a century and a half and can be traced to Count Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon,the brilliant French social thinker,and to his protege Auguste Comte,the "father of sociology.Partly as a reaction to the social stultification of the last days of the French kings and the explosiveness of the reluctant Revolution,Saint-Simon and later Comre,Speculated on what the administration of the future would be like.They thought that technology would spawn new professions;that administrators would be appointed on the basis of skill rather than heredity;and the organisation would be created spontaneously ,evolve "naturally",and be a liberating force for humanity.
Characteristics of the Open Model of Organisations
- The principal features of the open model of organisation are
- Non routine tasks occur in unstable conditions
- Specialized knowledge contributes to common tasks(thus differing from the closed model's specialized task notion in that the specialized knowledge possessed by nay one member of the organisations may be applied profitably to a variety of task undertaken by various other members of the organisations).
- Ends (or getting the job done) rather than means are emphasized.
- Conflict within the organisation is adjusted by interaction with peers,rather than adjudicated from the top.
- "Shedding of responsibility"is emphasized (in other words ,formal job descriptions. are discarded in favor of all organisational members contributing to all
- Conflicting within the organisation is adjusted by interaction with peers,rather than adjudicated from the top.
- "Shedding of responsibility"is emphasized (in other words ,formal job description are discarded in favor of all organisational members contributing to all organisational problems.)
- One's sense of responsibility and loyalty is to the organisation as a whole.
- The organisation is perceived as a fludic netwrok structure(ie..the organisational "looks" like an amoeba)
- knoweldge can be located anywhere in the organsiation (in other words ,everybody knows something relevant about the organsiation but noone including the chief executive,knows everything).
- Interaction between people in the organisation tends to be horizontal (ie..papers interact with peers),as well as vertical.
- The style of interaction is directed towards accomplishment,"advice"(rather than commands),and is characterised by a "myth of [eergae". which eneverlops even the most obvious superordinated /subordinate relationsgips
- task acheivement and excellance of performance in accopolishing a task are emphaised ,sometimes at the expense of obidience to one's superiors.
- Pretige is "externalised (ie personal status) in the organisation is determined largely by one's professional ability and reputation rather than by office and rank ).
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