Week 7 : Emerging Organizational Paradigms

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Week 7 Emerging Organizational Paradigms

• Postbureaucracy connections with culture and
  learning/knowledge
• Features and illustrations of the
  postbureaucratic
• Change in the public sector
• Resistance to change from management

This chapter serves to consolidate and integrate
material presented elsewhere in the book that
addresses issues of bureaucracy and
postbureaucracy. It is particularly relevant for
contemporary debates about new organizational
forms and the significance of new information
and communication technologies in facilitating
networked /organic intra and
inter-organizational relations
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Postbureaucratic form (Heckscher)

• Consensus through dialogue rather than compliance
  with rules
• Information sharing rather than hoarding
• Mutual trust rather than departmental self
  interest
• Continuous change rather than set procedures

Identity and Power
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Example of Oticon Holding (from the company
website www.oticon.com)

• Our philosophy - people first!
• We believe that it takes more than technology
  to create the best hearing care solution. That's
  why we put the individual needs and wishes of the
  hard-of-hearing first in our development of new
  hearing care solutions. Because hearing care
  professionals are the key to ensuring that the
  optimum solution reaches those who need it, they
  are also the key to our success. This
  uncompromising focus on the needs of the
  hard-of-hearing forms the basis of everything we
  do at Oticon. Whether it's hearing instruments or
  fitting systems, audiology or technology, or our
  relations with hearing care professionals, our
  starting point remains the same We put people
  first
• Some of the biggest changes in the history of
  Oticon happen in the 1990s. The companys new
  headquarters in Copenhagen is designed as an
  open, paperless office environment, and Oticon
  wins worldwide recognition as the
  Spaghetti-organization

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Example of Oticon Holding (2)

• Global leader in production of hearing aids
• Mobile offices caddies containing bare
  essentials
• Work unit was the project office parked for
  duration of project
• Organizational roles emerge through interaction
  of team members
• Parallel rather than serial work processing
  (relay rugby)
• No partitions, walls or secretaries
• Group software systems

Control is generated through collective peer
pressure and obligations stemming from team
membership. In the postbureaucratic organization,
social and functional integration takes
precedence over differentiation and
specialization (Jaffee, p. 162)
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Example of Steelcase, Inc

• Office furniture manufacturer
• Rugby style model of product development to break
  down divisions between depts and disciplines
• Multiple work areas for private, project and
  shared purposes
• Mixed neighbourhoods
• Senior management located in centre of building
  for easy access
• Activity generators e.g. water coolers, break
  areas
• Movable furniture and walls to configure space
  for impromptu meetings etc
• Functionally inconvenient meeting rooms and
  labs to require employees to walk through
  different areas to come into contact with
  organizational strangers

6
Example of Reinventing Government

• Old public admin
• Public interest. Impartiality
• Efficiency
• Compliance with rules
• Function and structure
• Justify costs

• New Public Admin
• Citizens value
• Quality
• Adherence to norms
• Mission and service
• Meet targets

Inequality and Power
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Strong Cultures

• Strong cultures are based on intense emotional
  attachment and the internalization of clearly
  enunciated company values that often replace
  formal structures and therefore no longer require
  strict and rigid external control. Instead,
  productive work is the result of a combination of
  self-direction, initiative, and emotional
  attachment, and ultimately combines the
  organizational interest in productivity with the
  employees personal interest in growth and
  maturity (Kunda)

• The shared rules governing cognitive and
  affective aspects of membership in an
  organization, and the means whereby they are
  shaped and expressedthe shared meanings,
  assumptions, norms and values that govern
  work-related behaviour the symbolic, textual,
  and narrative structures in which they are
  encoded (Kunda)

Identity, Insecurity, Power
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The Learning Organization

• Organizing and learning are antithetical (?)
• To organize is to forget/reduce variety
• To learn is to increase variety
• Concept of the learning organization invites
  disorganization
• Generative v adaptive learning
• Systems thinking interdependence and
  collaboration to reach improved functioning

Insecurity, Inequality
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Management Resistance

• Increased responsibility improved motivation
  higher expectations of advancement and reward
  unfulfilled aspirations demotivation

Workers believe that most managements do not
want to share power or permit workers much
independence in decision-making.Worker requests
and pressures for greater decision-making and
power are assessed and evaluated by management in
light of its interests, and either resisted or
opposed. The workplace attitudes of the managers
surveyed in the study confirm the perceived
intransigence (Jaffee, p. 183 referring to study
by (Freeman and Rogers, 1999)
Identity, Inequality
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In Praise of Bureaucracy
Weber insists that the bureau must be assessed
in its own right as a particular moral
institution and that the ethical attributes of
the bureaucrat be viewed as the contingent
and often fragile achievements of that socially
organized sphere of moral existence. The ethical
attributes of the good bureaucrat
adherence to procedure, acceptance of sub and
super-ordination, commitment to the purposes of
the office and so forth do not therefore
represent an incompetent subtraction from a
complete or all-round conception of
personhood. Rather they should be regarded as a
positive moral and ethical achievement in their
own right. Paul du Gay, In Praise of
Bureaucracy, London, Sage, 2000, p. 4
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Summary / Take-Away

• The rational-bureaucratic model of organization
  remains dominant
• Espoused theory v. theory-in-use
• New forms of organization are emergent but can
  they be sustained?
• Claims of paradigm shifts are overblown
• Recurrent pressures to intensify and flexibilise
  work
• Moral dimensions/foundations of action in
  organizations remain significant