Sociology of organizations pdf download

Warriner Publisher: Greenwich, Conn. Author : Howard P. Author : Paul S. Factories, companies, and organizations have often been successive ways of organizing work from the beginning of industrialization up to our days. We are ever more aware of the importance of organizations in our lives. Sociology, which paid attention to the phenomenon of factories from the very beginning, has continued to be concerned about the study of organizations.

We will see here some aspects of that study. One can no longer hope to understand a complex society without understanding its organizations, any more than one can fully understand organizational life without grasping the social processes that shape it. Understanding Organizations takes a fresh look at the sociology of organizations, blending classic theories of industrial society with contemporary cultural studies, labor studies, social movement theory, and the role of nonprofits.

In each chapter, Lune describes the major ideas and the new work that define the topic, as well as asking how these assumptions came about and how they impact us in our daily lives. This book will be the ideal companion to courses on organizations across the social sciences, and has insights to offer all students of organized life, whether one is interested in entering the corporate world, starting an arts organization, or mobilizing for social change.

Author : Howard P. The most effective organizations provide members with opportunities to achieve their personal goals while pursuing the organization's objectives. Using a practical approach with minimal jargon, author Howard P. Greenwald covers the basic features of organizations such as roles, structure, reward systems, power and authority, and culture and introduces important theoretical perspectives related to these features.

The approaches identify economic and social factors that disrupt tight interrelationships, causing problems of organizational performance. To manage these problems, each approach is distinguished by the adaptive mechanisms offered that change organizational structure, strategies, and practices that are designed to improve organizational performance.

These approaches include strategic contingency, resource dependency, and neo-institutional and transaction cost analysis. The population ecology approach represents an exception to this pattern by assuming that individual organizations cannot change or change too slowly, so where problems of organization-environment interdependency occur, some organizations must fail.

The strategic contingency approach was popularized in the late s and became prominent as a loose framework for synthesizing the principal notions of organizations as open systems with objectivist empirical research.

The organization represents a configuration of strategies, structures, and processes, and the structural features that best fit the demands of environmental and internal contingencies are by definition the most efficient. Similar to economic models, the contingency approach emphasizes efficiency, but like sociology models, it contends that the structure of the organization depends on various environmental and strategy contingencies Donaldson Environmental contingencies include firm size and the complexity, predictability, and interdependence of technological and market changes.

Strategy and environmental factors are the contingencies affecting organizational structure, and efficiency is found in the fit or alignment of the environment and strategies with organizational structures. Strategies are considered part of the normative culture of the organization, with a presumption of an efficiency-seeking orientation among managers.

The notion of fit between the organization and its environment resides somewhere in management perception, interpretation, and action. Having perceived such contingencies, they would, for example, create new programs or specialized departments or adjust administrative rules or structures to adapt to these contingencies.

The contingency approach moved the sociology of organizations away from notions of a tight relation between the organization and the environment and that there was one best way to organize toward the notion that the better way to organize depended on the particular environmental contingencies confronting the organization. However, critics question the tautological character of organization-environmental fit and the capacity of managers to perceive and change organizational structure Pfeffer and Salancik Also unspecified are the internal dynamics that affect managerial strategies and the notion that the perception of environment contingencies may be social and political constructions rather than objective facts Pfeffer The resource dependence approach emerged in the late s, in part as a reaction to the structural contingency approach.

These resource requirements entangle the organization in patterns of power-dependence relationships. Similar to the contingency approach, the emphasis on economic or technological resources implicitly orients the framework toward private firms. Managers are responsible for gaining favorable exchanges and avoiding debilitating dependencies. They seek discretion to maintain their own power and to permit subsequent adaptations to new environmental dependencies. The distribution of power within the organization is seen as an outcome of environmental dependencies.

Thus, decision making is a function of the internal power structure, which interprets and defines the most critical dependencies and the choices of strategies to address them. Management mediates the relationship between the environment and the organization by adapting the organizational structure, negotiating favorable terms of exchange, and using a range of strategies from stockpiling supplies to joint ventures and mergers.

The sheer capacity to enact an environment implies that the resource dependency model is most appropriate for large, powerful, and dominating organizations. The resource dependency model focuses greater attention on internal organizational decision making and the efforts of managers to strategically adapt to the environment. However, the larger pattern of asymmetrical relations in which the focal organization is enmeshed is left largely unexplored. The neo-institutional approach began with the work of Meyer and Rowan Building on the earlier institutional school of Selznick, this approach represents a reaction to economic contingency and resource dependency models that postulate that organizational structure is the result of technical and economic contingencies in the environment.

Instead, this approach presumes that many sectors and even parts of organizations are free of these technical and economic constraints and that organizational structure is more the result of efforts to fulfill normative expectations in the environment.

The emphasis is on how organizational decision making is shaped, mediated, and channeled by normative institutional arrangements DiMaggio , where these arrangements take the form of routines, operating procedures, and standard ways of perceiving the environment and agreed-on value priorities. Broadly shared patterns of beliefs and habitual practices mitigate problems of uncertainty, leading to emphasis on the role of ideas and belief systems in supporting and structuring organizations.

Thus, organizations involve established procedures and rule-bound and standardized behaviors, and researchers attend to the process of infusing such procedures and behaviors into the organization as regularized and stable features Jepperson Organizational structures become similar as organizations interact and formal or informal rules emerge to govern these interactions.

Once institutionalized, or taken for granted, these rules exert powerful normative effects on subsequent organizational interactions, and changes in organizational structure result more from issues of legitimacy than from rational adaptation or efficiency.

DiMaggio and Powell contend that the primary institutionalizing mechanism is imitation, which also works through coercive and regulatory mechanisms of the state and professions that disseminate and elaborate sets of beliefs and rules about appropriate organizational structure and practices. Their point is that modern organizations cannot be adequately understood in terms of efficiency and adaptations to technical and economic contingencies because of the often contradictory demands of maintaining organizational effectiveness and legitimacy.

They adopt formal structures that are legitimate, while informal everyday activities pursue effective operations, independent of the formal structure. The institutional approach is more applicable to public sector organizations because of its greater sensitivity to issues of normative expectations and legitimacy. The approach is criticized as tautological in the sense that outcome is the evidence for the cause and there is a lack of specification of what practices, procedures, and behaviors are institutionalized and which ones are freer to vary Hall and Tolbert Also, the emphasis on normative features deflects attention from issues of interests, power, and conflict Perrow and the technical and economic challenges to the organization.

The population ecology or natural selection approach began with the works of Hannan and Freeman and Aldrich and Pfeffer and presumes a tight relationship between the organizational form and the environment by stressing the impact of the environment on organizational survival. In contrast with approaches that explain organizational change through adaptation of individual organizations, population ecology scholars emphasize selection processes such as competition embedded in the environmental or ecological conditions of a population of organizations.

This approach operates at the level of groups or populations of organizations that carry out similar activities, compete with each other, and are dependent on similar resources within the same ecological niche. They examine the birth or death rates of types or forms of organizations to identify the survival rates of a particular form. Organizational form changes not as a result of adaptation of existing organizations but through the replacement of one form of organization with another Hannan and Carroll The research objective is to explain the variation in form, the longevity of that form, and its birth rates and death rates Hannan and Carroll This collection highlights a number of directions in which organization theory could develop.

It also argues the need for an historical analysis of the sociology of organizations. Sylvia M. Bureaucracy and organizations after Weber Much of the sociology of organizations and of organizational theory has included debates with the ghost of Weber, but, to pursue the metaphor, according to Collins it is a pale and Sociologists examine organizations with attention to structure and objectives, interactions among members and among organizations, the relationship between the organization and its environment and the social significance or social meaning of the organization.

The ways of defining and examining organizations vary depending on the theoretical emphasis. Lively and provocative, this textbook is theoretically rigorous, disciplinarily informed and representative of heterogeneity within organizational studies. The readings represent a wide range of theoretical perspectives and substantive topics. Most readings are either classics in the field or works that are widely used and cited.

Author : Charles K. Warriner Publisher: Greenwich, Conn. Get this from a library! Sociology of organizations: structures and relationships. PDF is a hugely popular format for documents simply because it is independent of the hardware or application used to create that file. This means it can be viewed across multiple devices, regardless of the underlying operating system.

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