From Scott, W. R., & Davis, G. F. (2015). Organizations and organizing: Rational, natural and open systems perspectives. Routledge.

1. SOCIAL SCIENCE
• Anthropology
• Economics
• Political science
• Psychology
• Sociology
Any branch of academic study or science that deals with human
behavior in its social and cultural aspects.
Definition
Most popular social science majors
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2. SOCIAL SCIENCE
• study human beings in aspects ranging from the
biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to
the features of society and culture that decisively
distinguish humans from other animal species.
Anthropology
• study economic systems and how individuals and
organizations produce and exchange goods.
Economics
• study political institutions, government systems, and
political behavior.
Political
science
• study human development, social behaviors, and
emotions, which draw on social science methods.
Psychology
• study human societies to answer questions about
social change, disorder in society, and social
stratification.
Sociology
Most popular social science majors
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3. Base for Organization Theory
ORGANIZATION THEORY
Chapter 1
THE SUBJECT IS ORGANIZATIONS;
THE VERB IS ORGANIZING
Scott, W. R., & Davis, G. F. (2015). Organizations and organizing:
Rational, natural and open systems perspectives. Routledge.
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4. OUTLINE
The importance of organizations
Organizations as an area of study
Common and divergent interests
The elements of organizations
Defining the concept of organization
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5. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS
Ubiquity
• Organizations are perhaps the dominant characteristic of
modern societies.
 discovery (research organizations); child and adult socialization
(schools and universities); production and distribution of goods
(industrial firms, wholesale and retail establishments);
preservation of culture (museums, art galleries, universities,
libraries)
• Organizations rapidly increase in number and range of
applications.
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6. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS
Source of Social Ills?
• Power and Status
 a “power elite”
 societal stratification systems
 “disenchantment of the world”
• Personality and Performance
 damage the personalities and psyches
 “commercialization of human feeling”
 exploit others
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7. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS
As Media
• Organizations are the mechanisms—the media—by which
those goals are pursued.
• Organizations represent extensions of ourselves.
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8. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS
As Collective Actors
• Two kinds of persons:
 natural persons (you and me)
 collective or juristic persons (the Red Cross and General
Motors)
• As collective actors, organizations can take actions, use
resources, enter into contracts, and own property.
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9. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS
Theoretical Significance
• The study of organizations can contribute to basic sociological
knowledge by increasing our understanding of how generic
social processes operate within distinctive social structures.
• Contemporary history plays itself out in and through
organizations.
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10. ORGANIZATIONS AS AN AREA OF STUDY
Emergence of the Area
• Until the late 1940s, organizations did not exist as a distinct field
of social inquiry.
• Intellectual ancestors: Machiavelli, St. Simon, Marx, and Weber
• Recent forebears: Taylor, Barnard, Mayo, Follett, Lillian and Frank
Gilbreth
• Administrative Science Quarterly
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11. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Common Features
• Organizations as social structures created by individuals to
support the collaborative pursuit of specified goals.
• All resources cannot be devoted directly to goal attainment.
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12. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse organizations
 Sizes
 Largest organizational units found in modern society are
often military services
 Size should not be equated with success
 Small organizations are in the majority
 Sectors
 Large numbers of people are employed in the public sector.
 Forms
 For-profit or Nonprofit
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13. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse organizations
 Structural Characteristics
 Flat authority, control structure,
 multilayer hierarchy, project team, matrix structures
 Capital
 Equipment, Human capital
 Surrounding Environments
 Culture
 Keiretsu networks of Japan
 Post socialist forms of Hungary and China
 bank-centered capitalism of Germany
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14. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse research interests and settings
 Political scientists emphasize power processes and decision
making within the organization
 Economists examine the acquisition and allocation of scarce
resources within the organization, productivity and efficiency
 Sociologists focus on status orderings, on the effect of norms
and sentiments on behavior, and on organizational legitimacy
 Psychologists examine variations in perception, cognition, and
motivation among participants
 Anthropologists focus onthe effects of diverse cultural values
on the functioning of the system and its members.
Organizations are examined from different perspectives
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15. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse research interests and settings
 Frederick Taylor (1911) took a bottom-up, engineering
approach
 Henri Fayol (1919/1949) took a top-down, managerial
approach
 Hawthorne Studies
 Barnard (1938) and Selznick (1948) focused on the organization
itself as an adaptive social system
Schools of Organization and Management Thought
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16. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse research interests and settings
 Vannevar Bush (1994) distinct poles of science
 Stokes (1997) a two-by-two matrix: basic and application
“Basic Research” and “Applied Research”
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17. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse research interests and settings
• research that takes its cue from questions in the world and
answers them using organizational paradigms, rather than
pursuing questions arising strictly out of the paradigms
themselves
• interdisciplinary
• increasingly moved into professional schools
Problem-driven Research
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18. COMMON AND DIVERGENT INTERESTS
Divergent Features
Diverse levels of analysis
• the level of analysis is determined by the nature of the
dependent variable.
• the object of theoretical analysis—that is, by whether primary
attention is given to the behavior of individuals, of
organizations, or of systems of organizations.
 social psychological level
 organizational level
 ecological level
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19. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
FIGURE 1-2 Generic organizational chart.
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20. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
FIGURE 1-3 Congruence Model of Organizations, adapted from Nadler and Tushman (1997)
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21. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
Environment
• Porter’s (1980) “five forces” framework describes the factors
that make industries more or less attractive.
• Resource dependence theory analyzes how resource
exchanges with the environment create power/dependence
relations among organizations, and how organizations
respond to their situation of power or dependence.
• Network analysis provides means to measure these
power/dependence relations explicitly.
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22. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
Strategy and Goals
• Strategy describes the choices organizations make about
which markets or clients the organization intends to serve, the
basis on which it competes in its domain, the specific tactics
the organization employs, and the output goals it sets for
itself.
• Typology
 Prospectors, defenders, and analyzers
 Low-cost, differentiation, and focus
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23. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
Work and Technology
• Work describes the tasks that the organization needs to
accomplish given the goals it has set for itself.
• Technology
 a mechanism for transforming inputs into outputs
 often partially embedded in machines and mechanical
equipment but also comprises the technical knowledge and
skills of participants.
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24. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
Formal Organization
• Human resource practices describe how participants are
recruited, what kinds of rewards they receive, and what kinds
of careers they have once inside the organization, including the
promotion ladders offered.
• Job design describes what tasks are done as part of a single job.
• Organization structure groups together jobs into larger units,
such as teams and departments, and analyzes authority
relations and patterns of formal communication among
participants and units.
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25. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
Informal Organization
• Culture describes the pattern of values, beliefs, and
expectations more or less shared by the organization’s
members.
• Social networks are the informal connections among
individuals that often arise out of work patterns but
can have a large influence beyond them.
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26. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Essential Ingredients
People
• Individuals: knowledge and skills, how they fit with the tasks
they perform; their needs and preferences; and the broader
background they bring with them to the organization.
• Leaders: initial strategies and structures, and the
composition of the organization’s management team, often
reflect the experiences, preferences, and even whims of
founding leaders, and such individuals have an ongoing
influence on how organizations operate.
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27. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
A Corrective Argument; From Structure to Process
 Two important limitations to this approach
• First, the Nadler and Tushman model, as well as related
approaches, tends to perpetuate the dualism that
distinguishes structure, whether formal or informal, from
people and their actions.
• Second, the entire model is highly static, privileging elements
and structures over actions and processes.
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28. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
A Corrective Argument; From Structure to Process
 Giddens (1979; 1984)’s theory of structuration
• Social structures only exist to the extent that people act in
ways to reproduce ongoing patterns of action.
• Social structures are comprised of rules or schema (models
for behavior) and resources (both material and human).
 overcoming the age-old debates between freedom and order.
 reinforcing the need to take a more dynamic view of social
structure and behavior.
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29. THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
The Capacities of Organizations
From Hannan and Carroll (1995)
• Durability  persist over time, routinely and continuously
supporting efforts to carry on a set of specified activities
• Reliability  be good at doing the same things in the same way,
over and over, and for many types of activities there are many
advantages associated with this characteristic
• Accountability  take place within a framework of rules that
provides both guidelines and justifications for decisions and
activities
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30. DEFINING THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION
A Rational System Definition
organizations are collectivities oriented to the pursuit of relatively
specific goals and exhibiting relatively highly formalized social
structures.
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31. DEFINING THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION
A Natural System Definition
organizations are collectivities whose participants are pursuing
multiple interests, both disparate and common, but who recognize
the value of perpetuating the organization as an important
resource.
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32. DEFINING THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION
An Open System Definition
organizations are congeries of interdependent flows and activities
linking shifting coalitions of participants embedded in wider
material resource and institutional environments.
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33. DEFINING THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATION
Why Three Perspectives?
• The perspectives encompass somewhat divergent types of
collectivities and emphasize different facets of a given
organization.
• The notion of perspective serving as a conceptual umbrella
• It is very difficult to comprehend or to fruitfully utilize the large
literature on organizations without knowledge of the differing
perspectives underlying this work.
• The perspectives should be understood in two senses: the
historically specific versions and the underlying analytically
enduring features.
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