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A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIZATION THEORY

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Title: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIZATION THEORY


1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIZATION THEORY
  • Chapter 2

Mary Jo Hatch with Ann L. Cunliffe
2
Why A History of OT?
  • Because it provides a basis for
  • Understanding the current field
  • Understanding how and why the three perspectives
    emerged
  • Understanding the relationship between theory and
    practice
  • Avoiding reinventing the theoretical wheel

3
Organization Theory At Its Inception
  • Organization theory emerged as a recognizable
    field of study in the 1960s.
  • Two major sources of thought that formed the
    prehistory of organizational theory were
    Sociological and Managerial.

4
Modes of Reasoning
  • Inductive developing theory from practice.
  • (interpretive epistemology)
  • Deductive testing theory against practice.
  • (positivist epistemology)

5
Adam Smith, Political-Economist (1723-1790,
Scottish)
  • Looked at techniques of pin manufacturing to
    illustrate how
  • the division of labor can produce economic
    efficiency.

Image from "The Warren J. Samuels Portrait
Collection at Duke University
6
Karl Marx, Philosopher-Economist and
Revolutionary (1818-1883)
  • Regarded as one of the founders of sociology.
  • Theory of Capital
  • Managerial Control
  • Exploitation
  • Alienation

Image from "The Warren J. Samuels Portrait
Collection at Duke University
7
MARXS THEORY OF CAPITAL (1867)
  • Humans interact with the physical environment
  • Physical needs emerge
    Power relations

  • (capitalists/labor)
  • Labor need for collective work
  • Emergence of society culture

8
Emile Durkheim, Sociologist (1858-1917)
  • - Informal (social needs) and Formal
    organization.
  • - Development of objectivist research methods
    objective measurement, statistical description
    and analysis.

9
Max Weber, Sociologist (1864-1920)
  • Types of Authority
  • Traditional inherited
  • Charismatic attraction
  • Rational-Legal technical abilities

10
Max Webers Theory of Bureaucracy
  • Bureaucracy can rationalize social order
  • Formal Rationality - calculative
    techniques
  • Substantive Rationality - desired ends

11
Frederick Winslow Taylor, Engineer (1856-1915)
  • Founder of Scientific Management - applying
    scientific methods to work to maximize the
    benefits to employees, employers, and society.
  • Developed work standards, uniform work methods,
    order-of-work sequences, methods of placing
    workers, methods of supervision, and incentive
    schemes.

12
Mary Parker Follett, Scholar, Social Reformer,
Consultant (1868-1933)
  • Promoted employee involvement and democratic
    forms of organization.
  • Developed the principle of self-government of
    groups.

13
Henri Fayol, Engineer, CEO, Administrative
Theorist (1841-1925)
  • Developed administrative principles including
  • Span-of-control number of subordinates
    supervised by a manager.
  • Departmentation grouping similar activities.
  • Unity-of-command one person - one boss.
  • Scalar principle linking organizational members
    in a hierarchy.

14
Luther H. Gulick, Administrative Theorist
(1892-1992)
  • Developed a science of administration
  • - Organizational efficiency through the
    division of work
  • into small, specialized segments clear
    task definition,
  • instruction etc.
  • Defined the work of the chief executive through
    POSDCoRB.

15
POSDCoRB
  • Planning
  • Organizing
  • Staffing
  • Directing
  • Coordinating
  • Reporting
  • Budgeting

16
Chester Barnard, Executive and Management
Theorist (1886-1961)
  • Organizations as cooperative social systems
  • - the communication of goals
  • - worker motivation

17
Modernism - Enlightenment (Kant, Descartes,
Locke)
  • Replace superstition with reason
  • Control the environment through scientific
    knowledge
  • Human progress through scientific knowledge
  • The modern organization

18
General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968)
  • General Systems Theorists focus on the law-like
    regularities underlying and uniting all phenomena
    across the various branches of science.
  • Hierarchy of Subsystems
  • Interdependence
  • Holistic view

19
Table 2.1 Bouldings Hierarchy of Systems
  • Level 1 Framework
  • Level 2 Clock work
  • Level 3 Control
  • Level 4 Open (living)
  • Level 5 Genetic
  • Level 6 Animal
  • Level 7 Human
  • Level 8 Social organization
  • Level 9 Transcendental

20
A System
  • Environment
  • System
  • (input transformation
    output)
  • Subsystem Subsystem
    Subsystem
  • Subsystem Subsystem

feedback
feedback
21
Socio-Technical Systems Theory
  • Human behavior and technology are
    interrelated, therefore any changes in technology
    will affect social relationships, attitudes, and
    feelings about work. Both need to be balanced.
  • Autonomous work groups
  • Psychological needs of individuals

22
Contingency Theory (1960s)
  • Contingency theorists believe that the most
    appropriate way of designing and managing an
    organization depends upon the characteristics of
    the situation in which the organization finds
    itself.

23
Contingency Theory
  • Identify contingent factors.
  • Determine the best fit.
  • If . then

Goals
Technology
People
Environment
24
Symbolic Interpretive Influences
  1. The crisis of representation questions our
    relationship with our social world and the ways
    in which we account for our experience.
  2. Social constructionism we construct our social
    world and our knowledge of that world in our
    everyday interactions.

25
Symbolic-Interpretivism
  • Challenges objective science and modernism.
  • Applies ethnographic and interpretive approaches
    to organizations.
  • Uncovers multiple interpretations of
    organizational members.
  • Emphasizes the role of context in shaping and
    interpreting meaning.

26
Symbolic-Interpretivists Explore
  • How people create meanings in organizations
    through their interpretation of utterances,
    stories, rituals, actions, and so on.
  • How individuals and groups create multiple
    meanings and interpret them from their own
    cultural contexts.
  • How multiple interpretations of individuals and
    subcultures blend to socially construct
    organizational reality.

27
Social Constructionism
  • Social reality is both objective and subjective
    -- an ongoing
  • interaction of people and their social world.
  • The process of social construction involves
  • Intersubjectivity created between us
    via shared
  • history and experience.
  • Objectified reality seemingly objective and
    stable
  • but continually reconstructed in
  • actions.

28
Symbolic-Interpretive Theories Include
  • Social Construction Theory (Berger Luckmann,
    1966)
  • Sensemaking Theory Enactment (Weick, 1979,
    1995)
  • Institutionalization (Selznick, 1949)
  • Reflexivity (Clifford Marcus, 1986)

29
Berger Luckmanns Social Construction of
Reality (1966)
  • Externalization
  • (creating personal shared
    social meanings,
  • routines etc
    intersubjectively)
  • Socialization
  • Objectification
  • (stable interactions, meanings etc
  • make the world seem real to us)
  • Internalization
  • (taking on social eanings,
  • roles actions)

30
Sensemaking Theory (Weick, 1995)
  • Organizations exist in the minds of
    organizational members in the form of cognitive
    maps, or images
  • of experience.
  • We make them real in our actions (reification).
  • We talk and act organizations into existence
    (enactment).

31
Institutionalization
  • Organizations compete and adapt to the demands
    and values of their environment, society, and of
    internal groups.
  • Institutionalization occurs as actions are
    repeated.

32
Reflexivity - Constructionist Approaches
  • Every view is a situated one - based on our
    interpretive community.
  • We need to accept that we not only construct our
    realities, but also our knowledge of those
    realities.
  • We should therefore explore how we construct
    social and organizational realities, and the
    influence our assumptions and practices have on
    the research process and on knowledge (critical
    self-reflexivity).

33
Some Postmodern Influences
  • Critical Theory and the critique of
  • - the Enlightenment Project (rational,
    universal knowledge)
  • - the Progress Myth (progress through
    science).
  • Poststructuralism and the critique of language as
    accurately representing reality and the idea that
    words have fixed meaning.

34
A Few Postmodern Ideas
  • Language Games
  • Grand Narratives
  • Discursive Practices
  • Deconstruction
  • Simulacra

35
Language and Meaning (Saussure, 1959)
  • Signifier
  • Bird
  • Fugl
  • Oiseau .
  • The bird is swimming on the water.

Signified
36
Language - A Postmodern View
  • Modernism assumes words (signs) are a neutral
    medium for representing external objective
    reality
  • Postmodernism takes a non-representational view
    language constitutes reality
  • Saussure the meaning of words does not reside in
    what is signified words take their meaning from
    other words
  • Thus, depending on which other words we use,
    different meanings will occur
  • Therefore, meaning is undecidable and unstable
    and language constitutes a world in flux.

37
Language Games (Wittgenstein , 1953, 1980)
  • The meaning of a word depends upon how it is
    used.
  • Language use is influenced by rules - how words
    and responses are connected.
  • Language and rules have stability but also change
    in practice.
  • Meanings and rules are socially situated and vary
    across communities, i.e. language games.

38
Grand Narratives
  • Postmodernists criticize Grand Narratives
    (progress myth, universal Truth, wealth creation)
    because they legitimize ways of thinking and
    acting that promote
  • what is True
  • what is good knowledge
  • self-interest
  • . and silence and marginalize others.

  • We need to give voice to silence.

39
Discourse and Discursive Practices
  • Foucault argued that power/knowledge are entwined
    and influence / are influenced by discursive
    practices.
  • Discursive practices are systems of rules that
    determine the rationality and legitimacy of
    particular forms of knowledge. These rules are
    powerful because they create and regulate
  • - social institutions (the university,
    hospital)
  • - good knowledge
  • - who we are (expert or not)
  • - what we say (discourse)
  • - how we act.

40
Power/Knowledge
  • Knowledge is produced and maintained through
    historical,
  • cultural, and discursive codes and
    practices.
  • Certain people or groups define what is normal
    and not
  • normal by codifying knowledge.
  • These groups use this knowledge to define and
    regulate
  • who and what is normal.
  • Thus power is exercised through knowledge as
  • individuals are disciplined and
    controlled based on
  • these definitions and codes.

41
Power/Knowledge
  • In every society the production of discourse is
    at once controlled, selected, organized and
    redistributed according to a number of procedures
    whose role is to avert its powers and its
    dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its
    ponderous, awesome materiality
  • (Foucault, 1972
    216)

42
Différance
  • Derrida suggested that meaning is subject to the
    play of différance, because meaning
  • Defers is postponed because we explain words by
    using yet more words, and so move further away
    from
  • the original.
  • Differs words derive meaning from the interplay
    with their opposite, e.g., good/bad,
    organization/
  • disorganization

43
Meaning Defers.
  • ECONOMY thrifty management
  • Powerful in action growing vigorously
  • potent cogent as reasons etc

44
  • Deconstruction exposes the many ways in which
    texts can be interpreted the silences, absences,
    and gaps. It exposes the instability of meaning
    makes visible the other and is suspicious of
    dichotomies.

45
Reflexivity - Deconstructionist Approaches
  • Open up meaning and the relationship between
    author, text, subjects and reader to reflexive
    scrutiny.
  • Question the assumptions underlying management
    ideologies, power relations, management theory,
    organizational practices, and surface their
    impact on social experience.

46
Simulacra
Copies of copies of which there are no
originals..
47
Hyperreality
  • The collapse of reality into images. The
    production of simulations or fantasies of worlds
    that do not exist.
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