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Charles Perrow Quotes
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Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. February 1925 – 12. November 2019
Charles Perrow: 71   quotes 0   likes

Charles Perrow Quotes

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 75

Sense

“Apparent leadership problems are often problems of organizational structure.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 10

Problem

“Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter “materials” (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "Hospitals: technology, structure and goals", 1965, p. 915

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 855

Way , Behavior , Decision

“I consider all large organizations troublesome, including governmental and nonprofit organizations. They concentrate power in the hands of their top management; the larger the organization, the greater the power being concentrated. There are degrees of concentration of course, and some large organizations are so disorganized that they lose much of their potential power. But size is generally correlated with these kinds of power: By deciding where to locate they determine economic opportunities for some communities and deny it to others. Their hiring decisions affect the life chances of people, and can, unless checked, favor religious, ethnic, racial, and political affiliations. As consumers of resources, they can favor certain producers over others, and not necessarily on the grounds of “efficiency.””

Charles Perrow

They can mobilize political resources to insure favored treatment better than small organizations.
Charles Perrow, in: " Organizational Efficiency vs. Power: An Email Interview with Professor Charles Perrow http://blogs.gonomad.com/blog/2005/10/organizational-efficiency-vs-power-charles-perrow.html." blogs.gonomad.com, Oct. 2005.
1980s and later

Life , People , Communication , Decision

“Techniques are performed upon raw materials. The state of art of analyzing the characteristics of the raw materials is likely to determine what kind of technology will be used. (Tools are also necessary, of course, but by and large, the construction of tools is a simpler problem than the analysis of the nature of the material and generally follows the analysis.) To understand the nature of the material means to be able to control it better and achieve predictability and efficiency in transformation. We are not referring here to the 'essence of the material, only the way the organization perceives it to be … The other relevant characteristic of the raw material, besides the understandability of Its nature, is Its stability and variability; that is, whether the material can be treated in a standardized fashion or whether continual adjustment to it is necessary. Organizations uniformly seek to standardize their raw material In order to minimize exceptional situations. This is the point of de-individualizing processes found in military academies, monasteries and prisons, and the superiority of the synthetic shoe material Corfam over leather.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

Art , Shoe , Way , Fashion

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 133

“The less the expertise, the more direct the surveillance, and the more obtrusive the controls. The more the expertise, the more unobtrusive the controls. The best situation of all, though they do not come cheap, is to hire professionals, for someone else has socialized them and even unobtrusive controls are hardly needed. The professional, the prima donna of organizational theory, is really the ultimate eunuch - capable of doing everything well in that harem except that which he should not do, and in this case that is to mess around with the goals of the organization, or the assumptions that determine to what ends he will use his professional skills.”

Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow, "Is business really changing?." Organizational Dynamics 3.1 (1974): 31-44.
1970s

“The power structure will generally dictate the operative goals of the organization.”

Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow (1963). "Goals and Power Structures: A Historical Case Study." In: E. Friedson, (Ed.), The Hospital in Modern Society. New York: The Free Press, p. 114
1960s

“Organization theory…has been altogether too accommodating to organizations and their power.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. iii

“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.
Yet every organization of any significant size is bureaucratized to some degree or, to put it differently, exhibits more or less stable patterns of behaviour based upon a structure of roles and specialized tasks. Bureaucracy, in this sense, is another word for structure.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 50

Sense , Change , Personality

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 2

Change , Time