SOWO 804: Introduction to Organizational Theories Lecture II

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SOWO 804 Introduction to Organizational
TheoriesLecture II

• Tamara H. Norris, Instructor
• Management and Community Practice
• School of Social Work
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3550

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Nature of Human Service Organizations (HSOs)

• HSOs can be contradictory to clients and workers
• Workers have a goal to help people
• HSOs offer intrinsic and extrinsic benefits
• HSOs can also cause frustration
• Clients are the raw material?
• HSOs process, sustain, or attempt to change
  people

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Human Services as Moral Work

• Moral judgments and statements of social work
• Diagnostic labels----statements of social worth
• Allocation of resources
• Rationing
• The Deserving

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Gendered Work

• Women have been historically assigned caretaker
  roles
• Patriarchal ideology---women as nurturers
• Women are the majority of frontline workers
• Conflict between womens contributions to social
  work and HSO norms and values
• Devaluation of womens work in human services in
  earnings, positions, and social
  status----LONGITUDINAL SEXISM?
• Legitimacy issues lack of resources, poor
  services often provided to clients who are mostly
  poor women

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The Primacy of Institutional Environment

• HSOs conform to dominant cultural, social
  symbols, and belief systems of interest groups
  in their environments
• HSOs access to resources is dependent on their
  adherence to environmental norms
• HSOs technical proficiency matters less than the
  ability to accommodate the escalating, often
  competing diversity in their service areas
• HSO rules and legitimacy are in flux

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Moral Entrepreneurs and Cyclical Legitimacy

• HSOs influence public perceptions of their
  clients
• parents as partners
• consumers as potential welfare cheats
• Cycles occur within the communities of HSOs
• Support for Aid to Families with Dependent
  Children (AFDC)
• 1996 Welfare Reform Personal Responsibility and
  Work Reconciliation Act (PRWRA)
• PRWRA changed the perception of welfare from
  allowing dependency to mandating work

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Human Service Technologies as Enactment of
Practice Ideologies

• Technologies are socially approved and sanctioned
• State Plans are best judgments of best
  practices that are frequently resource-based
• Measures of effectiveness involve moral choices
  that are part of practice ideologies
• Effectiveness is also politically determined How
  so?

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Client Reactivity and Service Trajectory

• Clients can react and participate
• The reactions of neither clients nor staff can be
  completely controlled
• Many HSO services are compartmentalized and
  delivered in discrete ways
• The diagnosis of a clients needs may not take
  into account his/her total ecology. Why is this
  so often so?

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Client Compliance

• Selection of clients who are amenable to services
  enhances control and responsibility
• Limiting and constraining client options improves
  tracking
• Social control is the result
• Is such control the best approach?

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Centrality of Client-Worker Relations

• Client-Worker relations are the core of HSOs
• The quality of these relations are critical to
  service delivery and successful outcomes
• Best cooperation is based on trust!
• But trust is impersonal and difficult to maintain
  due to the often irregular contact between HSOs
  and clients

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HSO Forms as Moral Practices The
Case of Welfare Departments

• Need to understand how HSOs select and implement
  moral rules that guide their work
• HSOs and their workers participate in this
  process (micro interaction)
• HSO rules are also driven by political interests
  (macro interactions)
• Moral assumptions are a constant in the welfare
  system

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Theoretical Approaches

• Rational-Legal Model (RLM)
• HSOs have a clear and specific set of goals and
  their internal structure and processes represent
  a rational design to attain them
• Internal divisions of labor, clear definitions of
  roles, and levels of authority are formalized
• The RLM cannot handle multiple and changing
  environmental influences

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Human Relations Approaches (HRAs)

• HSO effectiveness is a function of its goals and
  the personal needs of workers
• The quality of leadership is an important
  determinant of workers job satisfaction
• Burn-out is an increasing problem in todays HSOs
• HRAs, alone, cannot overcome political and
  economic constraints

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Negotiated Order and Political Economy

• Work structures are a product of negotiated
  order among the participating actors (clients
  workers)
• Services must have legitimacy, power, and
  resources (money, clients, and personnel)
• Political economy understates values and
  ideologies that transcend power and money in
  shaping HSO behavior

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Marxist and Institutional Theory

• Labor in HSOs is controlled through hierarchy,
  standard operating procedures, and the deskilling
  of jobs
• The market economy impacts HSOs
• Rules from the institutional environment
  determine the HSO structure
• Societal and HSO values are the driving forces
• HSOs uphold rules by coercion and/or imitation

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Population Ecology

• Groups and organizations that have similar
  characteristics and structure
• Focuses on the evolution of HSOs founding,
  disbanding, and change in population
• Population ecology is sometimes inappropriately
  applied to HSOs and generates inaccurate
  interpretations of HSO environments

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Organizational Theory and
Behavior

• Classical Organization Theory
• Scientific Management Theory (Taylor 1917)
• Four Basic Principles
• Find one best way to perform task
• Match each worker to the appropriate task
• Supervise workers, using reward and
  punishment as motivators
• Managements role is planning and control

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Organizational Theory (contd)

• Bureaucratic Theory
• Clear lines of authority and control
• Hierarchical structure of power
• Division of labor and specialization
• Rules for stability and uniformity
• Administrative Theory
• Emphasize universal set of management principles
  that can be applied to all organizations

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Neoclassical Organizational
Theory

• Hawthorne Experiment
• Barnard (1968)
• Organization is a system of consciously
  coordinated activities
• Success depends on leaders ability to create a
  cohesive environment
• Authority is derived from subordinates
  acceptance, not hierarchical power structure

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Neoclassical Organizational Theory
(contd)

• Limited Rationality Model--Simon (1945)
• Workers may respond unpredictably to managerial
  attention
• The scientific method has to be rigorously
  applied

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Contingency Theory

• Chandler (1962)
• Form follows function
• Organizations act in a rational, sequential
  linear manner to adapt to changes in the
  environment.
• Ability to adapteffectiveness
• Lawrence and Lorsch (1969)
• Managers should be given authority over their
  domain

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Systems TheoryLudwig von Bertalanffy (1928)

• All components of an organization are
  interrelated, changing one variable might impact
  many others
• These relationships can be nonlinear
• Nonlinearitycomplexity

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Organizational Structure

• Systems Theory and Organizational Structure
• Relationship Patterns Among Organ. Parts
• Integration
• Differentiation
• Structure of hierarchical relationships
• Formalized policies, procedures, and controls
• Relationship Between Organization and Environment
• Complex environmentsgreater differentiation
• Two-way flow of information and energy

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Organizational Birth and Growth (contd)

• Cameron and Whetten (1983)
• Four Stages of Organizational Life Cycles
• Entrepreneurial
• Collectivity
• Formalization and Control
• Elaboration
• Land and Jarman (1992)
• Entrepreneurial and Bifurcation
• Reversal in strategy toward rule standardization

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Organizational Birth and Growth (contd)

• Child and Keiser (1981)
• Growth Can Occur in Four Organizational Models
• Striving for dominance with existing field/domain
• Diversification into new domains
• Technological advancements
• Improved managerial techniques

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Organizational Decline

• Biological Determinism( Boulding1950)
• Irreversible trend toward death
• Biological Life Cycle
• Peak and decline or never reach peak
• Signs of Decline
• Loss of morale, leadership, planning, innovation
• Conflict, secrecy, rigidity, scapegoating
• Conservatism, over-confidence

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Organizational Turnaround

• Biebault (1982)Four Stage Model
• Change in management
• Evaluation
• Implementing emergency actions and stabilization
  procedures
• Return to growth
• Five Process DomainsZammuto and Cameron (1985)
• Defense and Offense
• Creating new domains
• Consolidation and Substitution

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Final Theory Components

• The Learning Organization (Senge 1990)
• Continually enhancing ability to create
• Community (Godz 1992 Peck 1987)
• Organization acting as a community
• Organizational Morality (Adam Smith 1937)
• Accountability, amorality, legalistic, ethics