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Formal Organizations

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Tables.......................................................................ViiIntroduction to the Classic Edition..................................................ixPreface..............................................................................xvii1. Introduction......................................................................1The Concept of Formal Organization...................................................2The Study of Formal Organizations....................................................8Methods in the Study of Organizations................................................15The Comparative Approach.............................................................252. The Nature and Types of Formal Organizations......................................27Theoretical Concepts.................................................................27Typologies of Formal Organizations...................................................40Types of Formal Organizations........................................................45Concluding Remarks...................................................................583. The Organization and Its Publics..................................................59Professional and Bureaucratic Orientation............................................60The Public...........................................................................74Conflicts with Clients...............................................................81Concluding Remarks...................................................................854. The Social Structure of Work Groups...............................................87Informal Organization................................................................89Effects of Group Structure...........................................................100The Larger Organization and Work-Group Structure.....................................108Concluding Remarks...................................................................1155. Processes of Communication........................................................116Experiments on Communication and Performance.........................................116Field Studies of Communication in Formal Organizations...............................128Variations in Communication Patterns.................................................134Concluding Remarks...................................................................1396. The Role of the Supervisor........................................................140Styles of Supervision................................................................141Supervision and Performance..........................................................150Hierarchical and Peer Relations......................................................159Concluding Remarks...................................................................1637. Managerial Control................................................................165The Hierarchy........................................................................167Impersonal Mechanisms of Control.....................................................176Questioning Some Prevailing Assumptions..............................................183Concluding Remarks...................................................................1928. The Social Context of Organizational Life.........................................194The Social Environment of Organizations..............................................195Organizational Analysis..............................................................206Interorganizational Processes........................................................214Concluding Remarks...................................................................2219. Organizational Dynamics...........................................................222Organizational Development...........................................................223Emergent Patterns....................................................................234Dilemmas of Formal Organization......................................................242Dialectical Processes of Change......................................................250Appendix. Description and Comparison of the Two Welfare Agencies.....................254Bibliography.........................................................................258Index of Names.......................................................................303Index of Topics......................................................................306

Chapter One

This book is about organizations-organizations of various kinds, with diverse aims, of varying size and complexity, and with different characteristics. What they all have in common is that a number of men have become organized into a social unit-an organization-that has been established for the explicit purpose of achieving certain goals. If the accomplishment of a task requires that more than a mere handful of men work together, they cannot simply proceed by having each do whatever he thinks needs to be done; rather, they must first get themselves organized. They establish a club or a firm, they organize a union or a political party, or they set up a police force or a hospital, and they formulate procedures that govern the relations among the members of the organization and the duties each is expected to perform. Once firmly established, an organization tends to assume an identity of its own which makes it independent of the people who have founded it or of those who constitute its membership. Thus organizations can persist for several generations, not without change but without losing their fundamental identity as distinct units, even though all members at some time come to differ from the original ones. The United States Army today is the same organization as the United States Army in the World War of 1914-1918, even though few if any of its 1918 personnel have remained in it and its structure has undergone basic alterations.

Even when men who are living together do not deliberately plan and institute a formal organization, however, a social organization develops among them; that is, their ways of acting, of thinking, and in particular of interacting with one another come to assume distinct regularities. Neighborhoods, families, work groups, and play groups reveal such an organization of social life, and so do total societies. Indeed, the entire subject matter of the social sciences can be considered to consist of explanations of various aspects of social organization. Whenever a social scientist discovers a new principle or social pattern in what had previously appeared to be chaos-and this kind of discovery is the object of all social theory and research-he thereby demonstrates something about the orderly structure or organization of social life. The study of social classes and stratification is concerned with one aspect of the organization of societies; the study of economics, with another-for even an unplanned economy is not an economy without organization. But there is obviously a difference between a planned economy and an economy whose organization emerges as the result of the interplay between diverse forces; and there is a parallel, more extreme, difference between the way a business firm is organized and the way a...