Answers to Questions on Readings

Greg Dawson

Management 710

Answers To Questions On Readings

Scott Chapter 1

Question 1

C. Wright Mills

Pointed with alarm to the emergence of a "power elite" whose members occupied the top positions in three overlapping organizational hierarchies: the state bureaucracy, the military, and the large corporations.
Another recent example of the "power elite includes multinational corporations.

Norman Mailer

Civilization extracts its thousand fees from the best nights of man, but none so cruel as the replacement of the good fairy by the expert, the demon by the rational crisis, and the witch by the neurotic female.
Organizations are viewed as the primary vehicle by which, systematically, the areas of our lives are rationalized--planned, articulated, scientized, made more efficient and orderly, and managed by "experts"
Macdonaldization is another example.

Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message.
McLuhan focused attention on the characteristics of the mass media--print, radio, movies, television--in contrast with the content transmitted by these media.

Like media, organizations represent extensions of ourselves. Organizations can achieve goals that are quite beyond the reach of any individual.

Coleman

Coleman describes how rights and capacities have gradually developed since the Middle Ages to the point where it is accurate to speak of two kinds of persons-natural persons and collective or juristic persons.
We must come to the recognition that the society has changed over the past few centuries in the very structural elements of which it is composed.

George Homans

The fact that the organization of the large formal enterprises, governmental or private, in modern society is modeled on, is a rationalization of, tendencies that exist in the human groups.

Scott Chapter 1

Question 2

Rational System Definition

Organizations are collectivies oriented to the pursuit of relatively specific goals. They are "purposeful" in the sense that the activities and interactions of participants are coordinated to achieve specifies goals. Goals are specific and clearly defined.

Organizations are collectivities that exhibit a relatively high degree of formalization. The cooperation among participants is "conscious" and "deliberate".

Natural System

Organizations are collectivities whose participants are pursuing multiple interests, both disparate and common, but recognize the value of perpetuating the organization as an important resource. The informal structure of relations the develops among participants provides a more informative and accurate guide to understanding organizational behavior.

Open System

Organizations as coalitions of participants with varying interests highly influenced by their environment.
Open systems emphasize that individuals have multiple loyalties and identities.

New Definition

If an organization is to survive, it must induce a variety of participants to contribute their time and energy for its success.

Scott Chapter2

Question 1

Goals

Goals are conceptions of desired ends. These conceptions vary in the precision and specificity of their criteria of desirability. Specific goals provide unambiguous criteria for selecting among alternative activities.

Formalization

Formalization can be viewed as an attempt to make more explicit and visible the structure of relationship among a set of roles and the principles that govern behavior in the system.
It enables participants or observers to diagram the social structures and the work flows, allowing them to depict these relationships and processes with the possibility of consciously manipulating them--designing and redesigning the division of responsibilities, the flow of information or materials, or the ways in which participants report to one another.

Question 2

Scott--Taylor

Taylor insisted that it was possible to scientifically analyze tasks performed by individual workers in order to discover those procedures that would produce the maximum output with the minimum input of energies and resources.
Efforts were concentrated on analyzing individual tasks, but attempts to rationalize labor at the level of the individual worker inevitably led to changes in entire structures of work arrangements.

Question 3

Taylor's Perspective

Taylor was pragmatic in his approach, beginning with the individual jobs, superior work procedures could be developed and appropriate arrangements devised for articulating the various tasks to be performed.

Fayol's Perspective

Developed concurrently with scientific management, Fayol's approach emphasized management functions and attempt to generate broad administrative principles that would serve as guidelines for the rationalization of organization activities.
The administrative management theorists worked to rationalize the organization from the "top Down"

Weber

Weber's analysis of administrative structures was only a limited aspect of his much larger interest in accounting for the unique features of Western civilizations. In his view, what was distinctive was the growth in the West, and his active mind roamed across legal, religious, political, and economic systems.

Simon's Perspective

Simon concept enables us to understand better how thousands and even hundreds of thousands of individual decisions and actions can be integrated in the service of complex goals.
Such rational, purposeful collective behavior requires the support of an organizational framework.

Scott Chapter 3

Question 1

Organizational goals and their relation to the behavior of participants are much more problematic for the natural than for the rational system.
Natural system analysts pay more attention to behavior and hence worry more about the complex interconnections between the normative and the behavior structures of organization.
The natural system theorists do not deny the existence of highly formalized structures within organizations, but they do question their importance, in particular their impact on the behavior of participants.

Question 2

Functional Analysis

A functional explanation is one in which the consequences of some behavior or social arrangement are essential elements of the causes of that behavior.

Question 3

Mayo

Mayo studied individual factors such as fatigue in an attempt to determine the optimum length and spacing of rest periods for maximizing productivity.

Barnard

Nature of Organization
His treatise was one on the first systematic attempts to outline a theory of organization.
Barnard's ideas contributed to human relations approaches and provided a foundation for both Selznick's institutionalist views and Simon's theory of decision making.
Barnard stresses that organizations are essentially cooperative systems integrating the contributions of their individual participants.

Selznick

The most important thing about organization is that, though they are tools, each nevertheless has a life of its own.
He agrees with the rational system analyst that the distinguishing characteristic of formal organizations is that they are rationally ordered instruments designed to obtain goals.

Parsons

Parsons developed a very explicit model detailing the needs that must be met if a system is to survive.
Adaptation: the problem of acquiring sufficient resources.
Goal attainment: the problem of setting and implementing goals.
Integration: the problem of maintaining solidarity or coordination among the sub-units of the system.
Latency: the problem of creating, preserving, and transmitting the system's distinctive culture and values.

Marx

This school emphasizes the extent to which participants' interests diverge and values conflict.

Scott Chapter 4

Question 1

Boulding Typology

Composed of nine levels

Frameworks
Clockworks
Cybernetic Systems
Open Systems
Blueprinted-growth Systems
Internal Image System
Symbol-Processing Systems
Social Systems
Transcendental System

The typology quickly persuades of us the great range and variety of systems present in the world.
Although the nine levels can be distinctly identifies and associated with specific existing systems, they are not meant to be mutually exclusive.
Each higher level system incorporates the features of those below it.

Question 2

Open Systems

Open Systems are capable of self-maintenance on the basis of a thououghput of resources from the environment.
The open system view of organizational structure stresses the complexity and variability of the individual parts--both individual participants and subgroups--as well as the looseness of connections among them.

Question 3

There are so many uncertain factors in the work environment today that nothing is certain. The only thing certain is that the environment will change.

Scott Chapter 5

Question 1

Etzioni

Etzioni has proposed a "structuralist" approach as a synthesis of the classical (rational) schools and the human realtions (natual) schools.
Etzioni argues that both the rational and the natural system theorists have important, and different, things to say about control systems within organizations.
In addition to combining the rational and natural system perspectives in the analysis of the central issue of power, Etzioni proposes that the structuralist model gives equal attention to formal and informal structures, and in particular to the relations between them: to the scope of informal groups and the relations between such groups both inside and outside the organization: to both social and material rewards and their interrelation; and to the interaction of the organization and its environment.
If the perspectives seem at times to conflict, this is because the organizational elements to which they point sometimes conflict.
The recognition of such conflicts is an important part of the "whole" truth about organizations, their structural features, and their functioning.

Lawrence & Lorsch

Lawrence argues that if an open system perspective is taken--so that any given organization is viewed not in isolation but in relation to its specific environment--then the rational and the natural system perspectives may be seen to identify different organizational types that vary because they have adapted to different types of environments.
The rational and natural system perspectives are at variance because each focuses on a different end of the continuum representing the range of organizational forms.
At one extreme, some organizations are highly formalized, are centralized, and pursue clearly specified goals; at the other extreme, some organizations are less formalized, rely greatly on the personal qualities and initiative of participants, and cannot be as clear and determinant as to their goals.
The open system perspective is viewed by Lawrence and Lorsch as the more comprehensive framework within which the rational and natural system perspective may be housed, since each of the latter constitutes only a partial view depicting particular organizational adaptations to differing environmental conditions.

Thompson

Thompson argues that analysts should be mentally flexible enough to admit the possibility that all three perspectives are essentially correct and applicable to all portions of an organization.
Three Levels

The technical level
The managerial level
The Institutional Level

Thompson proposes that each of the three perspectives is suitable to a different level of the organization: the rational system perspective to the technical level, the natural to the managerial, and the open to the institutional level.
Thompson's thesis in a nutshell is that organizations strive to be rational although they are natural and open systems.

Question 2

Question 3

Some of the theories may be complementary; others are based on contradictory assumptions or pose incompatible arguments.
One of the characteristics of much of the work introduced is that, in developing arguments and making claims, the analysts employ language that is sufficiently general to imply that the ideas are applicable to all types of organizations.