Philip Selznick Quotes

American sociologist (1919–2010)

(January 8, 1919 – June 12, 2010) was an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. A noted author in organizational theory, and public administration.

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Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals... they are expendable. Institutions... may be partly engineered, but they have also a “natural” dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.

The institutional leader, then, is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values.

The action of the officials tends to have an increasingly internal relevance , which may result in the deflection of the organization from its original path, which, however, usually remains as the formally professed aim of the organization.

Institutionalization is a process. It is something that happens to an organization over time, reflecting the organization’s own distinctive history, the people who have been in it, the groups it embodies and the vested interests they have created, and the way it has adapted to its environment.