Charles Perrow: Organizing

Charles Perrow was American sociologist. Explore interesting quotes on organizing.
Charles Perrow: 142   quotes 0   likes

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 52

People , Effort

“The Basic Argument In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: when the tasks people perform are well understood, predictable, routine, and repetitive, a bureaucratic structure is the most efficient. Things can be "programmed," to use March and Simon's term. Where tasks are not well understood, generally because the 'raw material' that each person works on is poorly understood and possibly reactive, recalcitrant or self activating. the tasks are non-routine. Such units or organizations are difficult to bureaucratize.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 166

People , Personality

“People's attitudes are shaped at least as much by the organization in which they work as by their pre-existing attitudes.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 4

People

“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:
:* centralized authority
:* clear lines of authority
:* specialization and expertise
:* marked division of labor
:* rules and regulations
:* clear separation of staff and line
The forces of light, which by mid-twentieth century came to be characterized as the human relations school, emphasizes people rather than machines, accommodations rather than machine-like precision, and draws its inspiration from biological systems rather than engineering systems. It has emphasized such things as:
:* delegation of authority
:* employee autonomy
:* trust and openness
:* concerns with the "whole person"
:* interpersonal dynamics
The forces of darkness formulated their position first, starting in the early part of this century. They have been characterized as the scientific management or classical management school…”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 3

People , School , Light , Parting

“Another discipline began to intrude upon the confident work and increasingly elaborate models of the human relations theorists (largely social psychologists) and the uneasy toying with bureaucracy of the "structionalists" (largely sociologists). Both tended to study economic organizations. A few, like Philip Selznick, were noting conflict and differences in goals (perhaps because he was studying a public agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority), but most ignored conflict or treated it as a pathological manifestation of breakdowns in communication or the ego trips of unreconstructed managers.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 7

Confidence , Communication , Study

“Multiple leadership, as a stable system of goal determination and policy setting, is most likely to be found in organizations where there are multiple goals and where these goals lack precise criteria of achievement and allow considerable tolerances with regard to achievement. Organizations with a single goal [i. e., proprietary hospitals] or a clear hierarchy of goals provide little basis for multiple leadership. Multiple leadership arises because important group interests diverge, and each group has the power to protect its interests.”

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. 132
1960s

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 59

Change

“By technology is meant the actions that an individual performs upon an object, with or without the aid of tools or mechanical devices, in order to make some change in that object. The object, or 'raw material', may be a living being, human or otherwise, a symbol, or an Inanimate object. People are raw materials in people-changing or people-processing organizations; symbols are materials in banks, advertising agencies, and some research organizations; the interactions of people are raw materials to be manipulated by administrators in organizations; boards of directors, committees, and councils are usually Involved with the changing or processing of symbols and human interactions, and so on.”

Charles Perrow

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

People , Change

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Variant: 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.
Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 857

Training

“To call for decentralization, representative bureaucracy, collegial authority, or employee-centered, innovative or organic organizations - to mention only a few of the highly normative prescriptions that are being offered by social scientists today - is to call for a type of structure that can be realized only with a certain type of technology, unless we are willing to pay a high cost in terms of output. Given a routine technology, the much maligned Weberian bureaucracy probably constitutes the socially optimum form of organizational structure.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 204

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 128

Personality

“Most studies of the internal operation of complex organizations, if they mention goals at all, have taken official statements of goals at face value. This may be justified if only a limited problem is being investigated, but even then it contributes to the view that goals are not problematical. In this view, goals have no effect upon activities other than in the grossest terms; or it can be taken for granted that the only problem is to adjust means to given and stable ends. This reflects a distinctive "model" of organizational behavior, which Gouldner has characterized as the rational model. Its proponents see the managerial elite as using rational and logical means to pursue clear and discrete ends set forth in official statements of goals, while the worker is seen as governed by non-rationalistic, traditionalistic orientations.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 854.

Behavior , Problem , Study

“It [a power based model of organization] sees organizations a intentional human constructions but not necessarily rational systems guided by official goals; as bargaining areas rather than cooperative systems; as systems of power rather than coercive institutions reflecting cultural norms, and as resources for other organizations and groups rather than closed systems. If we define organizations, then, as intentional human constructions wherein people and groups within and without the organization compete for outputs of interest them under conditions of unequal power, we have posed the issue of effectiveness quite differently”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "Three Types of Effectiveness Studies," 1977, p. 101 ; As cited in: Diehl-Taylor (1997)

People

“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”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 119

School , Support , Reality

“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?”

Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2002/2009. Book abstract.
1980s and later

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 13

Learning , Cry

“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.”

Charles Perrow

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

People , Problem

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "Three Types of Effectiveness Studies," 1977, p. 97

“Then the works of Max Weber, first translated from the German in the 1940s — he wrote around 1910, incredibly — began to find their way into social science thought. At first, with his celebration of the efficiency of bureaucracy, he was received with only reluctant respect, and even with hostility. All writers were against bureaucracy. But it turned out, surprisingly, that managers were not. When asked, they acknowledged that they preferred clear lines of communication, clear specifications of authority and responsibility, and clear knowledge of whom they were responsible to. They were as wont to say "there ought to be a rule about this," as to say "there are too many rules around here," as wont to say "next week we've got to get organized," as to say "there is too much red tape." Gradually, studies began to show that bureaucratic organizations could change faster than non-bureaucratic ones, and that morale could be higher where there was clear evidence of bureaucracy.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 6

Hostility , Way , Communication , Knowledge

“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.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 4

People