Charles Perrow Quotes

What do individuals or groups of similarly hope to gain from participation in the affairs of the organization? Or, to use an awkward phrase we shall reiterate frequently, what are the uses to which they put the organisation?

For our purposes then, the bureaucratic model refers to an organization which attempts to control extra-organizational influences (stemming from the characteristics of personnel and changes in the environment) through the creation of specialized (staff) positions and through such rules and devices as regulations and categorization.

Most social scientists consider the non-bureaucratic, or nonroutine organization to be good and the bureaucratic or routine organization to be bad (it impedes progress, is old- fashioned, is hard on its employees, etc.). But this judgment is debatable.

It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.

Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter “materials” (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.

Unambiguous pursuit of official goals is not likely to be common.

The structural viewpoint considers the roles people play, rather than the nature of the personalities in these roles. It deals with the structures in which roles are performed— the relationship of groups to each other, such as sales and production, and the degree of centralization or decentralization.

While [bureaucratic] solutions have been frequently criticized by those within and without the organization, no alternative way has been found to cope with the problem of organizing large numbers of people to produce goods and services efficiently.

I consider all large organizations troublesome, including governmental and nonprofit organizations. They concentrate power in the hands of their top management; the larger the organization, the greater the power being concentrated. There are degrees of concentration of course, and some large organizations are so disorganized that they lose much of their potential power. But size is generally correlated with these kinds of power: By deciding where to locate they determine economic opportunities for some communities and deny it to others. Their hiring decisions affect the life chances of people, and can, unless checked, favor religious, ethnic, racial, and political affiliations. As consumers of resources, they can favor certain producers over others, and not necessarily on the grounds of “efficiency.” They can mobilize political resources to insure favored treatment better than small organizations.

To call for decentralization, representative bureaucracy, collegial authority, or employee-centered, innovative or organic organizations - to mention only a few of the highly normative prescriptions that are being offered by social scientists today - is to call for a type of structure that can be realized only with a certain type of technology, unless we are willing to pay a high cost in terms of output. Given a routine technology, the much maligned Weberian bureaucracy probably constitutes the socially optimum form of organizational structure.

The hundreds of scientific studies of this phenomenon come to one general conclusion: Leadership is highly variable or "contingent" upon a large variety of important variables such as nature of task, size of the group, length of time the group has existed, type of personnel within the group and their relationships with each other, and amount of pressure the group is under. It docs not seem likely that we'll be able to devise a way to select the best leader for a particular situation. Even if we could, that situation would probably change in a short time and thus would require a somewhat different type of leader.

The dominant group, reflecting the imperatives of the particular task that is most critical (to the organization), their own background characteristics (distinctive perspectives based on their training, career lines, and areas of competence) and the unofficial uses to which they put the organization for their own ends.

Without this form of social technology, the industrialized countries of the West could not have reached the heights of extravagance, wealth and pollution that they currently enjoy.

In research terms, the issue is to examine and explain the variations within and among residential institutions.

Chapter Five deals with the messiest problem of all— but the one to which all analytical roads should lead : the nature of organizational goals and the strategies used to achieve them.