Charles Perrow Quotes

Then the works of Max Weber, first translated from the German in the 1940s — he wrote around 1910, incredibly — began to find their way into social science thought. At first, with his celebration of the efficiency of bureaucracy, he was received with only reluctant respect, and even with hostility. All writers were against bureaucracy. But it turned out, surprisingly, that managers were not. When asked, they acknowledged that they preferred clear lines of communication, clear specifications of authority and responsibility, and clear knowledge of whom they were responsible to. They were as wont to say "there ought to be a rule about this," as to say "there are too many rules around here," as wont to say "next week we've got to get organized," as to say "there is too much red tape." Gradually, studies began to show that bureaucratic organizations could change faster than non-bureaucratic ones, and that morale could be higher where there was clear evidence of bureaucracy.

From the beginning, the forces of light and the forces of darkness have polarized the field of organizational analysis, and the struggle has been protracted and inconclusive. The forces of darkness have been represented by the mechanical school of organizational theory — those who treat the organization as a machine. This school characterizes organizations in terms o£ such things as:

As with all theories, we can learn something from agency theory and transaction-costs economics, since they emphasize something others hide. But as with all theories, they also distort; in fact, I will argue that their distortions outweigh the value of what they highlight.

The Basic Argument In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: when the tasks people perform are well understood, predictable, routine, and repetitive, a bureaucratic structure is the most efficient. Things can be "programmed," to use March and Simon's term. Where tasks are not well understood, generally because the 'raw material' that each person works on is poorly understood and possibly reactive, recalcitrant or self activating. the tasks are non-routine. Such units or organizations are difficult to bureaucratize.

Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.

The vast proportion of the activity in organizations goes on without personal directives and supervision – and even without written rules – and sometimes in permitted violation of the rules.

It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate

People in these fields no longer agree that such things as norms, values, and personality really exist or account for much; these concepts may only give a false sense of order to a world that both the academic and the person in the street desperately want to order. Sociology, too, is having some difficulty swallowing the simple, obvious proposition that attitudes predict behavior. (The proposition that morale predicts productivity is just one specification of this.)

Barnard comes close to joining Roethlisberger and Dickson in their assumption that management behavior is mainly rational and workers' behavior nonrational.

Particularism means that irrelevant criteria like e.g. only relatives of the boss have a chance at top positions, in contrast to universalistic criteria like e.g. competences is all that counts, are employed in choosing employees... The particularistic criteria are likely to be negatively related to performance.

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.

People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization.

Organization theory...has been altogether too accommodating to organizations and their power.

The concept of organizational goals, like the concepts of power, authority, or leadership, has been unusually resistant to precise, unambiguous definition. Yet a definition of goals is necessary and unavoidable in organizational analysis. Organizations are established to do something; they perform work directed toward some end.

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.