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Four Perspectives on Organizations
This note describes four images or metaphors on organizations that furnish distinctive lens or paradigms for thinking about behavior in organizations, understandings its causes, and developing programs for change. Note that each image or metaphor draws attention to a limited set of organizational properties and characteristics as critical for understanding, but pays scant attention to a host of other aspects that fall outside its purview. Thus, they concentrate attention and interest, but in a highly simplistic ways that obscures the richness of organizational phenomena. Presumably, managers equipped with the ability to view organizations through diverse lens will achieve greater understanding.
A. Organizations as Machines
This was the first image to dominate management thought about the nature of organizations. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the growth of large-scale organizations and the need to develop ways of managing them. Prior to this time, organizations were smaller, their owners typically managed them, and the relatively few employees could be supervised directly by the owner. The evolution of factory technologies coupled with the growth of efficient capital markets enabled small organizations to grow in the latter part of the 1800s. In the process, the number of owners often increased and most were passive shareholders with no active management role. At the same time, extensive immigration in the latter part of the 19th century provided firms with large pools of cheap labor to run the new machinery and the number of employees often grew rapidly. These changes led to increasing demand for "professional" managers capable of organizing and controlling the workforce for the mass production of rather simple goods to serve the interests of the absentee owners.
Armies, churches, and governments furnished early management theorists in the U.S. with their only models of what efficient large-scale organizations might look like. In each case, the highly bureaucratic structures suggested that factories engaged in mass production should be designed as a highly specialized machine that could maximize efficiency. Efforts to design organizations as machines proved extremely successful and clearly play a role in the emerging dominance of the U.S. economy in the 20th century.
This design model focuses on several organizational properties:
1. Mission, goals, strategies, planning, and control. If we take seriously the notion that it helps to think of organizations as machines, the first question that comes up has to do with the purpose of the machine since different machines are needed for different purposes.
The time of the Industrial Revolution allowed little room for smaller companies to make a name because the big businesses had monopolies over certain areas of industry. Therefore, for a person to make a name for himself, he had to do so with ambition, money, reputation, and inner strength. By reason of an owner not possessing these qualities, then by the rigors of business owning he would be mentally crushed by the amount of work that falls upon the owner's shoulders. In addition, even though labor came cheaply to t...
Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. E. (2013). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2013). Reframing Organizations (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
The immigrants would soon shape the development of American labor in the latter part of the 19th century. The “four major trends—loss of control over workplace, labor conflict, rapid geographic mobility, and the increase of diversity” (Aurand), were the factors that changed American labor. By 1870, the need for skilled labor would soon diminish due to mechanization. Mechanization ultimately turned the small shops into large factories, condensed with machines to further increase the worker efficiency. Frederick Winslow
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2008). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2008). Reframing organizations. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
Law and social order constitute important elements of social change and theories of criminology (Schmalleger, 2012). Understanding the interplay between them, law and social order, gives us important insights into how and why governments either work or fail. Three different perspectives outline the interplay between the two and help us understand what is happening behind the scenes in various forms of government. These three perspectives are the consensus, pluralist, and the conflict perspectives.
The second half of the 19th century introduced a new style of enterprise to America, Big Business. The 19th century values of work and of being an independent business man clashed with the modern 20th century values of extreme expansion with large work forces and of earning the most money possible. The rise of the robber barons and the captains of industry helped the economy by pushing America into first place in the production of several products and by creating many new jobs. Although these new opportunities appealed to the masses, not everyone was satisfied by his new occupation. The creation of labor unions was a reaction to the numerous complaints about working conditions, wages, and work hours. The first unions protested with peace and reason. Once they realized that nothing could be accomplished through negotiation, drastic measures were taken and violence was the answer to their problems. The clashes between management and workforce in the Great Railroad Strike, Homestead Strike, and Pullman Strike emphasize these crises that were resolved through force and destruction.
Robbins , Stephen P. and Judge, Timothy, A. Organizational Behavior. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Prentice Hall. Pearson Custom Publishing. 2008 Print
PRIMIS MNO 6202: Managing Organizations. 2007. The 'Secondary' of the ' Reprint of the book. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.
Jones, G. R. (2010). Organizational theory, design, and change. 6th Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
The Different Ways Organizations Can Be Structured and Operated There are four major ways a company - organization can be structured and operate. P.C.G (o) Ltd I would dare say that is structured and operates with the functional structure. In order to make it clear and understandable I am analyzing here below the four ways that organizations can structure and operate. We will observe that all four structures have there advantages and disadvantages. In order also to assist you understand better the differences of the four ways that organizations can be structured see in Page 4 & 5 Figures 1,2,3 which are the layout of the organization charts for each structure: 1.
Organizations must operate within structures that allow them to perform at their best within their given environments. According to theorists T. Burns and G.M Stalker (1961), organizations require structures that will allow them to adapt and react to changes in the environment (Mechanistic vs Organic Structures, 2009). Toyota Company’s corporate structure is spelt out as one where the management team and employees conduct operations and make decisions through a system of checks and balances.
As the theme of my essay I have chosen to find out what our contemporary society must not forget in order to be able to make organizational theory evolve well into the 21st century. For this task I have decided to take a look back to Aldous Huxley’s modern dystopia “Brave new world”, that warned against totalitarian regimes that intended to suppress individuality in order to advance the interest of the state in its time. Even as those regimes might not be a direct threat nowadays we can eerily conclude that some aspects of it are quite accurate for the times we live in. According to Phillip Yancey who suggested that “there is a much more subtle enemy inchoate within each of us - a natural tendency for people to trade autonomy for comfort, safety and amusement.” This for the most people does not set off alarms but I will argue that it is the most basic requirement that has to be met in our day and age in order to tackle the wide range of issues that we face at the crossroads leading to the future, whether we talk about humanity or organizational theory itself. I think the novel gives us the perfect opportunity to draw parallels with our contemporary society, and see what must be corrected within post modernity based on how things evolved over the course of history and from prophetical books like Huxley’s even as at his time it was only intended to be satire. In the World State people are controlled by technologies like genetic engineering, sleep-learning and drugs like soma to satisfy needs and gently induce masses to enjoy their servitude. If one were to describe postmodernism in just a word or two, "skepticism" and "relativism" would probably best capture the overall ethos of its adherents. Deep skepticism about...
Ivancevich, John, Knopaske, Robert, Matteson, Michael, Organizational Behaviour and Management (10 edition (January 30, 2013). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin