Charles Perrow: Work

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

“[People-processing institutions are] a type of social institution in which human beings constitute both the raw materials and the products of organizational work. Although all social institutions are involved in some degree in people-processing activities, the term is properly restricted to those whose primary goal is the shaping, reshaping, removing, overhauling, retooling, reassembling, and recording the physical, psychological, social, legal, or moral aspects of human objects.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 163; as cited in: David Shichor (2005), The Meaning and Nature of Punishment. p. 107

People

“Two aspects of this work process are of critical importance.”

Charles Perrow

1960s, "Hospitals: technology, structure and goals", 1965

“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

“Executives were closely observed at work at their desks, at staff meetings, while talking with inmates or moving about the grounds and so on, and again in the feedback sessions when we gave them findings.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 48

“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

“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

“Routine tasks… are well-established techniques which are sure to work, and these are applied to essentially similar raw materials, That is, there is little uncertainty about methods and little variety or change in the tasks that must be performed.”

Charles Perrow

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

Change

“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

“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

“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

“Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.”

Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 133

“All complex organizations use people to pursue their tasks, but people-changing organizations work not only with or through people but also on them. People constitute the raison d'etre of these organizations, and, and, as our label suggests, the desired product is a new or altered person. People-changing organizations can be contrasted with organizations that produce, distribute, or service inanimate objects or symbols. The latter may have important consequences for their members' statuses, role-orientations, identities, and personalities, but these alterations are usually incidental, personal, or instrumental. In people-changing organizations the alterations re the primary end. Conceived in this way, the term "people-changing" encompasses a broad variety of organizations, ranging from the monastery (which cleanses the soul while teaching the outward signs of grace) to Menninger's (which restructures the personality), and even to the House of Venus”

Charles Perrow

which reshapes buttocks and identity simultaneously
Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 3

People , Way , Soul , Change

“Organizational theorists, at least since the pioneering work of Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Joan Woodward, 1965 and others in what came to be called the contingency school, have recognized that centralization is appropriate for organizations with routine tasks, and decentralization for those with nonroutine tasks. For an early statement see Perrow 1967, and Lawrence and Lorch, 1967.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 334

School

“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

“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