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"Ah, but
a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
1."I have
nothing to admit" -Gilles Deleuze
2."A map has
no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues,
tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own
voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed
chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: discover this, reexamine
that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here...Sometimes a map speaks
in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the
distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams."
3. " I would
like to explain how I view what I have written. I belong to a generation, one of the
last generations, that was more or less assassinated with the history of philosophy. History of
philosophy has an obvious, repressive function in philosophy; it is philosophy's very own
Oedipus. "All the same you won't dare to speak in your own name as long as you have not
read this and that, and that on this, and this on that."
Nietzsche whom I read late was the
one who pulled me out of all this. For it is impossible to
submit him to such a treatment. He gives you a perverse taste that neither Marx nor Freud have
ever given you: the desire for everyone to say simple things in his own name, to speak through
affects, intensities,experiences, experiments. To say something in one's own name is very
strange, for it is not at all when we consider ourselves as selves, persons, or subjects that we
speak in our own name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a true proper name as the
result of the most severe operations of depersonalization, when he opens himself to multiplicities
that pervade him and to intensities which run right through his whole being.
The depth of what I don't know, the deepness of my own underdevelopment is where I speak
from from.
The problem is not one of being this or that in man, but rather one of becoming human, of a
universal becoming animal: not to take oneself for a beast, but to undo the human organization
of the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us
discovering the zones which are really his, and the groups, the populations, the species which
inhabit him.
Why shouldn't I speak of medicine without being a doctor if I speak of it as a dog?
More information answering the essential questions can be found in the current cartography
of my
emergent doctorate:
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These are the papers completed. In 6 weeks for 7 classes last semester. That goes
along with all
23 web sites I put together for each of the seven
classes. Current Idea for Potential Thesis Work:
The History of
Documents:
iMap Envisaging the Art of Navigating
Conceptual Complexity
in search of software and processes combining artistic and conceptual insights
An exploration
I hope in part
to demonstrate the feasibility of enhancing comprehension, and navigating
complexity, using features uniquely dependent upon the riches and subtleties of artistic insight.
The concern here is with the design of a flexible architecture to demonstrate how the power of
both "scientific" and "artistic" approaches may be integrated to enhance comprehension
and
navigation of complexity -- as well as offering new forms of creativity in response to complex
conditions.
It is no longer widely believed that society has the collective ability to organize
collaborative
projects of a scope capable of making the breakthroughs called for by current challenges.
There is a suspicion that the challenge calls for quite another approach that makes greater, and
more imaginative, use of the information tools that our society has created in order to
counteract the tendency for collaboration to become tokenistic. Failing that, projects now run
the significant risk of being undermined by dynamics with which many are already all too
familiar.
The general concern
here is that of obtaining an integrative perspective on any complex of
social issues and potential responses, bearing in mind the need to zoom between levels of
complexity and to effectively pan between different ordering systems. Issues of learning are
then integral to any software specifications. Flexibility in reordering is fundamental -- in contrast
to many systems based on somebody's "good idea at the time" (which later proves very costly
to change in the light of new insights). There is a marked tendency for the replication of this
kind of inadequate thinking in electronic conferences. There is every indication that there should
instead be a heavy investment in moving towards what might be termed "conceptual
scaffolding" that can facilitate higher orders of consensus -- using differences rather than
becoming vulnerable to emergent differences.
A key question is whether valuable insights into complexity, vital to governance
and self-
governance of social processes, may only be representable and comprehensible through
presentations of an essentially artistic nature. It is then their aesthetic properties that have
valuable ordering and integrative functions. Given the well- demonstrated weaknesses of
current international policy- making, it would be unwise to assume that this is not the case.
Conceptual scaffolding:
The key feature
sought from this package might be described by phrases such as "conceptual
scaffolding" and "insight capture". The progressively refined artistic representation
would serve
as a form of scaffolding for an evolving pattern of insight. The artistic dimensions provide a form
of order through many patterns of associations which may be of a most tentative and even
playful quality -- compensating for the mechanistic connotations of scaffolding. Understanding
and creativity are supported and challenged by the relation between the representation and the
data held by it.
As with the construction
of any building, there is a basic need for "scaffolding" to hold the
conceptual and organizational elements in place, especially during the early phases of
"imaginative, interdisciplinary" interconnection. It may be argued that it is the lack
of this
scaffolding feature which prevents many potentially useful initiatives from "getting off the
ground" -- and "staying up". And the more complex the psycho-social structure, and the
more
communication space it spans, the greater the need for more complex scaffolding.
A typical function
of scaffolding in a conference is to provide a framework within which
complementary perspectives can be articulated, especially when there is a major tension
between them. For example, when Concept A is formulated, the scaffolding holds a space for
Concept B to counter- balance it. Such scaffolding is even more essential when more than two
concepts have to be held in balance. As with buildings, the scaffolding provides a protection
against disruptive forces in the conference process. A typical disruptive force in a
contemporary conference might focus narrowly on "industry is exploitative", when the larger
issue is to provide a sustainable framework in which to balance the exploitative characteristics
of industry against the socio- economic benefits that it provides in the light of environmental
constraints. The more complex the balance, the more vulnerable is the conference to disruptive
forces.
The challenge
is how to allow different category structures, and the groups advocating
them, to mesh or meld before their incompatibilities tear each other apart. This is a
major issue when dealing with the strong, creative, and often idiosyncratic, personalities (and
groups) whose collaboration is ideally required. It is seen in its most dramatic form in the
Middle East peace process and in negotiations among the warring parties in Bosnia. The
apparently disproportionate importance attached to "table layout" in any negotiation procedure
is a physical indication of the nature of the conceptual challenge. This argument implies that the
challenge is both mathematical and aesthetic.
Failure to respond
to this issue leads to project outputs whose only real integrative feature is the
physical binding of a document containing unrelateable "integrative" contributions -- however
skilfully worded the introduction may be (In German: Buchbindersynthese!).
The scaffolding
required not only has implications for elaboration of new structures. It also
supports the learning processes through which others subsequently come to grasp the scope
of such structures as viable alternatives to the simpler conventional patterns that have proven so
inadequate to the challenges of the times.
Providing means
for higher and subtler degrees of order to be carried by aesthetically organized
displays, allows otherwise incommensurable positions in conferences to be related in ways
renered impossible by the present hierarchical and legalistical approaches to order. This is also
true for any emergent agreements and communication protocols. Ironically this recalls some of
the underlying functions of heraldic devices and seals that still carry significance in secret
societies.
Whether for a coalition
of forces or for an individual, the computer-held aesthetic display could
become as fundamental an asset as intellectual property. It is potentially of greater value than
patents or copyright because it is effectively the generative aesthetic (or template) that holds the
pattern of insights through which products of lower order are created.
Where different
coalitions represent their respective ordering through contrasting aesthetic
displays, many opportunities then attach to the significance of the transformational pathways
between them (eg through morphing). This is of special relevance to any negotiation process.
Evolution of the
web environment has created a situation in which websites are effectively in
savage competition for limited user attention. This has been a major force towards multi-media
web facilities even amongst the most text- oriented institutions. This new situation can be
usefully understood through a botanical metaphor. In effect each website can be compared to a
species of flower. Flowers have had to acquire comparative aesthetic advantages over each
other to attract their potential "users" in order to survive. Webmasters anxiously monitor
the
"hits" their site receives, like spiders attentive to flies hitting their web. As with flowers,
some
websites are designed to "capture" users -- rather than assist them onwards to other locations.
The larger question
is then how complementary species of attention attractors are to be
understood as globally organized (in the integrative, non-geographical sense). What is the
knowledge ecosystem and how is its integrative (namely global) organization to be
comprehened? There may be a case for using the aesthetics of topography, and of the various
ecosystems and habitats, to hold knowledge for meaningful navigation. This would be a
somewhat ironic return to the classical approach reviewed by Frances Yates -- but in a
computer- enhanced aesthetic context. There wouild then be an elegant cognitive isomorphism
to the policy challenges of responding appropriately to the natural environment.
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The objective here
is to understand why organizations have the structure that they do. By
"structure" I mean things like degree and type of horizontal differentiation, vertical
differentiation, mechanisms of coordination and control, formalization, and centralization of
power.
According to Taylor,
Fayol, Weber and other classical theorists, there is a single best way for
organization to be structured. Yet organizations vary considerably on structural attributes. The
objective of much research has been to understand what determines these variations. Is it
random or systematic? Are some organizations simply less perfect than others, or are different
designs better for different situations?
Contingency Theory
In contrast to
the classical scholars, most theorists today believe that there is no one best way
to organize. What is important is that there be a fit between the organization's structure, its size,
its technology, and the requirements of its environment. This perspective is known as
"contingency theory" and contrasts with the perspective of classical theorists like Weber,
Taylor, Fayol, etc. who thought that there probably was one way to run organizations that was
the best.
Size
This refers to
capacity, number of personnel, outputs (customers, sales), resources (wealth).
Blau's studies
show that differentiation (# of levels, departments, job titles) increases with size,
but at a decreasing rate. In contrast, the % of the organization that is involved in administrative
overhead declines with size, leading to economies of scale.
Increasing size
is also related to increased structuring of organizations activities but decreased
concentration of power.
Managerial practices,
such as flexibility in personnel assignments, extent of delegation of
authority, and emphasis on results rather than procedures, are related to the size of the unit
managed.
Technology/Task
Consider check
processing at a bank. This activity is usually performed by a business unit that
is highly formalized, has a great deal of specialization and division of labor, and high
centralization of decision- making. In contrast, the creative section of an ad agency is usually
not formalized at all, the division of labor is often blurry, and it is highly decentralized.
It appears that
certain activities naturally "go with" certain structures. Joan Woodward found
that by knowing an organization's primary system of production, you could predict their
structure:
Unit production/small
batch. Companies that make one-of- a-kind custom products, or small
quantities of products (e.g., ship building, aircraft manufacture, furniture maker, tailors, printers
of engraved wedding invitation, surgical teams).
Organic structure
Mass production/large
batch. Companies that sell huge volumes of identical products (e.g.,
cars, razor blades, aluminum cans, toasters). Make heavy use of automation and assembly
lines. Typically,
-
bigger than small
batch
- Taller hierarchies
- bottom level is huge (supervisor span of
control is 48)
- Relatively greater number of managers (because
hierarchy is so tall)
- Mechanistic, bureaucratic structure
- Relatively cheap to operate
Continuous Production.
Primarily companies that refine liquids and powders (e.g., chemical
companies, oil refineries, bakeries, dairies, distilleries/breweries, electric power plants).
Machines do everything, humans just monitor the machines and plan changes.
Chick Perrow '67
looked at how the frequency and type of exceptions that occurred during
production affected structure. Two types of exceptions: (a) can be solved via orderly, analytic
search process (like mechanic fixing car), (b) no analytic framework, rely on intuition,
guesswork (like advertising, film-making, fusion research).
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Few
Exceptions
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Many
Exceptions
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Un-
analyzable
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pottery, specialty
glass, motel room
artwork; plumbing; computer technical
support (craftwork)
routine work, but when problems crop up, it
is hard
to figure what to do
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film making; aerospace;
(non routine
research)
tasks that no one really knows how to
do: work on intuition, implicit knowledge
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Analyzable
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routine, like screws;
(routine manufacturing)
the few problems that occur are usually easy
to understand
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custom machinery,
building dams;
(engineering production)
the application of well-known principles
and technologies to lots of new and
different situations
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It turns out that
bottom left organizations (analyzable and few exceptions) tend to be highly
centralized and formalized -- in short, bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are the best possible
organizational form when the task is well-understood, and how to best execute it can be
specified in advance.
At the other extreme,
the top right organizations (unanalyzable and many exceptions) are not
well handled by bureaucracies. There are so many exceptions and new situations that having a
set of formal procedures which specify how to handle every situation is out of the question.
Organizations in this box tend to be highly decentralized and use informal means of coordination
and control. The reasons have to do with human bounded rationality. (Bounded rationality
refers to the fact that since humans have limited brain capacity, we cannot always find the
absolute optimal solution to a given problem -- we only have the time and capacity to consider
a few possible solutions, and choose the best among those. But we can't consider all possible
solutions.) Really complex systems are difficult to pre-plan: there are too many contingencies.
We simply can't figure it all out. Need to allow for real-time, flexible adjustment.
Environment
Adaptation
Organizations actively
adapt to their environments. For example, organizations facing complex,
highly uncertain environments typically differentiate so that each organizational unit is facing a
smaller, more certain problem. for example, if Japanese tastes in cars are quite different from
American tastes, it is really hard to make a single car that appeals to both markets. It is easier
to create two separate business units, one that makes cars for the Japanese market, and the
other that makes cars for the US market.
Natural Selection
Organizations whose
structures are not fitted to the environment (which includes other
organizations, communities, customers, governments, etc.) will not perform well and will fail.
Most new organizations fail within the first few years.
If the environment
is stable, this selection process will lead to most organizations being well-
adapted to the environment, not because they all changed themselves, but because those that
were not well-adapted will have died off.
Dependence
The economy is
a giant network of organizations linked by buying and selling relationships.
Every company has suppliers (inputs) and customers (outputs). Every company is dependent
on both their suppliers and their customers for resources and money. To the extent that a
company needs it's suppliers less than they need it, the company has power. That is, power is a
function of asymmetric mutual dependence. Dependence is itself a function of the availability of
alternative supply. A depends on B to the extent that there are few alternatives to B that are
available to A. Dependence is also a function of how much A needs what B has got. If the Post
It's company starts to play hardball with you, and there are no good alternatives, it's still not a
big deal because Post It's are just not that important.
Organizations that
have power over others are able to impose elements of structure on them.
For example, GM is famous for imposing accounting systems, cost controls, manufacturing
techniques on their suppliers.
The sets of entities
in an organization's environment that play a role in the organization's health
and performance, or which are affected by the organization, are called stakeholders.
Stakeholders have interests in what the organization does, and may or may not have the power
to influence the organization to protect their interests. Stakeholders are varied and their interests
may coincide on some issues and not others. Therefore you find stakeholders both cooperating
with each other in alliances, and competing with each other.
 When stakeholders
are unconnected to each other (as in Figure 1), the organization usually has
an easier time of playing the different parties off one another. For example, it can represent its
goals and needs differently to each stakeholder, without fear of being found out. Or, such
competitive stakeholders into outbidding each other (e.g., a university can tel one alumnus that
another alumnus is about to give a huge donation). Furthermore, when the stakeholders are
unconnected, they cannot coordinate their efforts, and so have trouble controlling the
organization.
In contrast, when
the stakeholders are well-connected (as in Figure 2), the organization cannot
represent itself differently to each one, or it will be found out. Furthermore, if the bonds among
the stakeholders are closer than the bonds with the organization, the stakeholders may side with
each other against the organization, and won't act in ways that negatively affect other
stakeholders.
Institutionalization
Under conditions
of uncertainty, organizations imitate others that appear to be successful. In
other words, if nobody really knows what makes a movie successful, and then somebody has a
blockbuster hit, everybody else copies the movie, and the organizational structure that
produced the movie, hoping that they will get the same results. This can cause whole industries
to adopt similar structural features.
One reason why
this happens is the fear of litigation or simply blame. If several well-known,
successful companies start adopting some new management style -- say, self-governing teams -
- and you don't because you know its not appropriate for your company, and then things start
to go wrong for your company, people will say 'see? you should have adopted self- governing
teams. we told you so'. So to avoid that, if the top companies in a field all adopt some new
style, then all the others do to to avoid being blamed.
In addition, diffusion
of ideas due to personnel transfer and professional school training can
create uniformity as well.
'Self-organization'
is a popular theme in current studies of human social activity, enterprises, and
information technology (IT). This document introduces one well- developed theory of self-
organization (autopoietic theory) and discusses its application to enterprises and their
management.
Self-organization
is a
process
where the organization (constraint,
redundancy) of a system spontaneously increases, i.e. without this increase
being controlled by the environment or an encompassing or otherwise
external system
Self-organization
is a basically a process of evolution
where the effect of the environment is
minimal, i.e. where the development of new, complex structures takes place primarily in and
through the system itself. As argued in the section on
evolutionary theory
, self- organization can
be understood on the basis of the same variation and natural selection processes as other,
environmentally driven processes of evolution. Self- organization is normally triggered by internal
variation processes, which are usually called "fluctuations" or "noise". The fact
that these
processes produce a selective retained ordered configuration has been called the "
order from
noise
" principle by
Heinz von Foerster
, and the "order through fluctuations" mechanism by
Ilya
Prigogine
. Both are special cases of what I have proposed to call the
principle of selective
variety
.
Self-organization
is usually associated with more complex, non-linear phenomena, rather than
with the relatively simple processes of structure maintenance of diffusion. All the intricacies
(limit cycles, chaos
, sensitivity to initial conditions, dissipative structuration, ...) associated with
non-linearity can simply be understood through the interplay of positive and negative
feedback
cycles: some variations tend to reinforce themselves (see
Autocatalytic Growth
), others tend
to reduce themselves. Both types of feedback fuel natural selection: positive feedback because
it
increases the number of configurations (up to the point where resources become insufficient),
negative feedback because it stabilizes configurations. Either of them provides the configuration
with a selective advantage over competing configurations. The interaction between them
(variations can be reinforced in some directions while being reduced in others) may create
intricate and unpredictable patterns (
chaos
), which can develop very quickly until they reach
a stable configuration (
attractor
).
Keywords:
autonomy, autopoiesis,
Maturana (Humberto R.), second- order cybernetics, self-
organization, Varela (Francisco J.)
The term self-organization,
after decades of specialists' interest, has become an increasingly
popular label for phenomena which appear to determine their own form and process(es). There
is now widespread interest in applying theories of self- organization to analysis and (re-
)engineering of enterprises. 'Enterprise' is used here to denote purposeful social collectives
of
any scale. This term is employed for two reasons: (a) it carries the dual connotation of 'the
actors' and 'the activity', and (b) its usage avoids confusion with the very specific usage of the
term 'organization' in the framework introduced and discussed later -- autopoietic theory.
Increasing interest
in self-organization is a healthy development, insofar as it represents
enterprise researchers' and practitioners' growing appreciation for three key issues or themes.
These are:
-
Systemic perspectives
on enterprises
Since the origin of cybernetics in the Macy Conferences of the 1940's,
reciprocal cross- pollination between engineering, management, and social
scientists has fostered viewpoints of the enterprise as something 'more than
merely the sum of its parts.' The value of such systemic principles is well-
proven by the fact of their invocation by technocratic 'systems engineers', the
'socio-technical' proponents who claimed to supersede them, and the
'participatory design' proponents who claimed to supersede both.
- Auto-determination of system form and
function
Enterprises are not passive and rigid units -- their configuration and their
behavior evolve during the course of their operation. The precise paths of their
evolution are largely determined by the enterprises themselves. This is most
apparent where members of an enterprise actively plan and realize its
subsequent form. Recent trends in enterprise auto-determination range from
business process reengineering (BPR) through CPI and TQM to participatory
design (PD).
- Contextualization
Late 20th Century trends in social / management science practice (e.g., action
research, ethnomethodology and other qualitative approaches) have attempted
to overcome the limitations of 'objectivistic' approaches by focusing on people
and enterprises on their own (the subjects') terms - - who they are, where they
are, and how they are. Treating complex systems as units requires careful
attention to those factors which provide or qualify meaning in models of: (a)
their static delineation; (b) their dynamics over time; and (c) the manner in
which we as researchers study and (re- )engineer them. Examples of recent
attention to context range from 'situation awareness' in human factors to Lucy
Suchman's 'situated action' to the workplace- specificity of Scandinavian
participatory design practices.
The current trend
toward invoking 'self-organization', however, is potentially unhealthy to the
extent it does no more than replace the old objectivistic tautology 'X is what it is' with a New
Age version 'X is what it makes of itself'. Self- organization is a concept which must be applied
with analytical rigor to be useful. Theories of self-organization were devised in response to the
apparent complexities and paradoxes of natural phenomena. Perhaps not surprisingly, sloppy
application of these theories can make enterprises seem even more complex and paradoxical
than we already fear them to be. The notion of a system which determines itself entails a
circularity of cause and effect, and one must avoid 'circular reasoning' in analyzing this
circularity.
Furthermore, one
should be careful with respect to the term itself. Over the years, the term 'self-
organization' has been used to refer to a variety of distinct systemic attributes such as:
These nuances are
not mutually exclusive, and authors have invoked them in varying 'mixtures'.
Any approach to treating enterprises as self-organizing entities should, therefore, consider
which (or how many) of these connotations are being addressed, as well as what feature(s) of
the given system are being addressed as 'self-organizing' ( Whitaker, 1995
).
Autopoietic
Theory: One Approach to Self- Organization
The remainder of
this document will introduce and discuss the concept of autopoiesis, created
by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela ( 1980
;
1987
).
Their work (hereafter termed autopoietic theory) concretely addresses each of the issues
discussed above as follows:
In the quarter
century since its origin, autopoietic theory has generated considerable interest in
relatively specialized circles, with most of this interest concentrated in Europe. The goals of this
document are to introduce this work to a broader audience and to outline the manner in which
autopoietic theory can be (and has been) employed in studying and (re- )engineering
enterprises, their processes, and the information technology (IT) which supports them. |
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Historical Background
of Organizational Behavior
Certainly large
numbers of people have been doing work for a long time. Pyramids and many
other huge monuments and structures were built, armies and governments were organized,
Civilizations spread over vast territories. This took organization and management. There are
some writings from antiquity that suggest that systematic approaches to management and
organization did evolve and were transmitted to others.
But the primary
influences in organizations and management today stem from more recent
events.
Some would claim
that to begin to understand our organizations today we need to look at the
Protestant Reformationa nd the Protestant Ethic. A new ethic began to evolve, an ethic that
shifted the orientation of one's life from the "next world" to this world. This ethic is best
embodied in quotes from Luther ("All men possess a calling in the world and the fulfillment of
its
obligation is a divinely imposed duty") and Calvin ("Disciplined work raises a person above
the
calling into which he was born and is the only sign of his election by God to salvation"... "The
soul is naked before God without Church or communion-religion is a personal matter; worldly
success and prosperity are construed as signs of God's approval").
Over time, the
Protestant Reformation provided an ideological foundation for the modern
industrial society by suggesting that work is now a profound moral obligation, a path to eternal
salvation. The focuse focus is this world and materialism, not next world. The individual's
obligation is self- disciplin,and systematic work. It should be clear that the factory system which
began to evolve late in the 18th Century could never have flourished without the ideological
underpinnings of this profound shift in philosophy as exemplified by the Protestant Ethic.
Scientific Management
The Industrial
Revolution that started with the development of steam power and the creation of
large factories in the late Eighteenth Century lead to great changes in the production of textiles
and other products. The factories that evolved, created tremendous challenges to organization
and management that had not been confronted before. Managing these new factories and later
new entities like railroads with the requirement of managing large flows of material, people, and
information over large distances created the need for some methods for dealing with the new
management issues.
The most important
of those who began to create a science of management was Frederic
Winslow Taylor, (1856-1915). Taylor was one of the first to attempt to systematically analyze
human behavior at work. His model was the machine with its cheap, interchangeable parts,
each of which does one specific function. Taylor attempted to do to complex organizations
what engineers had done to machines and this involved making individuals into the equivalent of
machine parts. Just as machine parts were easily interchangeable, cheap, and passive, so too
should the human parts be the same in the Machine model of organizations.
This involved breaking
down each task to its smallest unit and to figure out the one best way to
do each job. Then the engineer, after analyzing the job should teach it to the worker and make
sure the worker does only those motions essential to the task.. Taylor attempted to make a
science for each element of work and restrict behavioral alternatives facing worker. Taylor
looked at interaction of human characteristics, social environment, task, and physical
environment, capacity, speed, durability, and cost. The overall goal was to remove human
variability.
The results were
profound. Productivity under Taylorism went up dramatically. New
departments arose such as industrial engineering, personnel, and quality control. There was also
growth in middle management as there evolved a separation of planning from operations.
Rational rules replaced trial and error; management became formalized and efficiency
increased. Of course, this did not come about without resistance. First the old line managers
resisted the notion that management was a science to be studied not something one was born
with (or inherited). Then of course, many workers resisted what some considered the
"dehumanization of work." To be fair, Taylor also studied issues such as fatigue and safety
and
urged management to study the relationship between work breaks, and the length of the work
day and productivity and convinced many companies that the careful introduction of breaks and
a shorter day could increase productivity. Nevertheless, the industrial engineer with his stop
watch and clip-board, standing over you measuring each little part of the job and one's
movements became a hated figure and lead to much sabotage and group resistance.
The core elements
of scientific management remain popular today. While a picture of a factory
around 1900 might look like something out of Dickens, one should not think the core concepts
of scientific management have been abandoned. They haven't. They have merely been modified
and updated.
The Human Relations
Movement
Despite the economic
progress brought about in part by Scientific Management, critics were
calling attention to the "seamy side of progress," which included severe labor/management
conflict, apathy, boredom, and wasted human resources. These concerns lead a number of
researchers to examine the discrepancy between how an organization was supposed to work
versus how the workers actually behaved. In addition, factors like World War I, developments
in psychology (eg. Freud) and later the depression, all brought into question some of the basic
assumptions of the Scientific Management School. One of the primary critics of the time, Elton
Mayo, claimed that this "alienation" stemmed from the breakdown of the social structures
caused by industrialization, the factory system, and its related outcomes like growing
urbanization.
The Western Electric
(Hawthorne Works) Studies (1923- 1933) Cicero, , ILL.
The most famous
of these studies was the Hawthorne Studies which showed how work groups
provide mutual support and effective resistance to management schemes to increase output.
This study found that workers didn't respond to classical motivational approaches as suggested
in the Scientific Management and Taylor approaches, but rather workers were also interested
in the rewards and punishments of their own work group. These studies, conducted in the
1920's started as a straightforward attempt to determine the relationship between work
environment and productivity. The results of the research led researchers to feel that they were
dealing with socio-psychological factors that were not explained by classic theory which
stressed the formal organization and formal leadership. The Hawthorne Studies helped us to
see that an organization is more than a formal arrangement of functions but is also a social
system. In the following chart, we can see a comparison of traditional assumptions vs. a newer
"human relations" view.
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Traditional
Assumptions
we act individually
to satisfy
individual needs
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Human relations
Assumptions
management requires
effective social skills, not just technical
skills
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Results of the
Hawthorne Studies and the related research
These studies added
much to our knowledtge of human behavior in organizations and created
pressure for management to change the traditional ways of managing human resources. The
Human Relations Movement pushed managers toward gaining participative support of lower
levels of the organization in solving organization problems. The Movement also fostered a more
open and trusting environment and a greater emphasis on groups rather than just individuals
Douglas McGregor's
Theory X and Theory Y
Douglas McGregor
was one of the great popularizers of Human Relations approach with his
Theory X and Theory Y. In his research he found that although many managers spouted the
right ideas, their actual managers indicated a series of assumptions that McGregor called
Theory X. However, research seemed to clearly suggest that these assumptions were not valid
but rather a different series of notions about human behavior seemed more valid. He called
these Theory Y and urged managers to managed based on these more valid Theory Y notions.
- Work is inherently distasteful
to most people
- Most people are not
ambitious, have little desire for
responsibility, and prefer to be
directed
- Most people have little
capacity for creativity in
solving organizational
problems
- Motivation occurs only at the
physiiological and security
levels
Most people must
be closely controlled and
often coerced to achieve organizational
objectives
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- Work is as natural as play if the
conditions are favorable
- Self-control is often indispensible in
achieving organizational goals
- The capacity for creativity is spread
throughout organizations
- Motivation occurs at affiliation,
esteem, and self-actualization levels,
not just security, physiological levels
People can be self-directed
and creative at work if
properly motivated
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SCHOOLS OF HISTORICAL
THOUGHT AND THEIR COMPONENTS BY DECADE
Org. theory prior
to 1900: Emphasized the division of labor and the importance of machinery to
facilitate labor
Scientific management(1910s-)--Described
management as a science with employers having
specific but different responsibilities; encouraged the scientific selection, training, and
development of workers and the equal division of work between workers and management
Landmarks in Management
Thought
THE FIELD OF ORGANIZATIONAL
BEHAVIOR
EMERGING TRENDS
IN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
-
Globalization
- Definition
- Occurs when an organization extends its
activities to other
parts of the world, actively participates in other markets, and
competes against organizations located in other countries.
- Implications for organizational behavior
- Requires new structures and different forms
of communication
to assist the organization's global reach.
- Creates new career opportunities and potentially
brings in new
knowledge to improve the organization's competitive
advantage.
- Emphasizes the need to recognize the contingencies
of effective
OB practices in different cultures.
- The Changing Work Force
- Trends
- Increase of minorities in the workforce.
- Increase of a multicultural workforce due
to an increasing
demographic diversity.
- Greater difficulty in discussing ethic
differences as inter- racial
marriages increase.
- Increasing representation of women in the
workforce.
- More job security expected by baby boomers-people
born
between 1946 and 1964.
- Less loyalty to one organization expressed
by Gen-Xers-
people born between 1964 and 1977.
- Impact of how Generation-Y employees -those
born in the
decade or so since 1979- affect the workplace.
- How diversity impacts organizational behavior
- Can lead to a competitive advantage by
improving decision-
making and team performance on complex tasks.
- Can present new challenges for companies
to overcome.
- Emerging Employment Relationships
- Employability: employees perform a variety
of work activities rather
than hold specific jobs, and they are expected to continuously learn
skills that will keep them employed.
- Contingent work: any job in which the individual
does not have an
explicit or implicit contract for long- term employment, or one in which
the minimum hours of work can vary in a nonsystematic way.
- Telecommuting: working from home usually
with a computer
connection to the office.
- Virtual teams: cross-functional groups
that operate across space, time,
and organizational boundaries with members who communicate mainly
through electronic technologies.
- Information Technology
- Lead to rise in telecommuting and virtual
teams.
- Creates opportunities to connect people
around the plant.
- Allows small businesses in developing countries
to compete in the
global marketplace.
- Leads to the creation of a network organization
-an alliance of several
organizations for the purpose of creating a product or serving a client.
- Workplace Values and Ethics
- Definitions
- Values - stable, long-lasting beliefs about
what is important in a
variety of situations.
- Cultural values - represent the dominant
prescriptions of a
society.
- Personal values - incorporate cultural
values, as well as other
values socialized by parents, friends, and personal life events.
- Organizational values - those which are
widely and deeply
shared by people within the organization.
- Ethics - the study of moral principles
or values that determine
whether actions are right or wrong and outcomes are good or
bad.
- Importance of values and ethics
- Rise of globalization leads to a multitude
of different values and
ethics in the workplace.
- Old "command-and-control" system
of direct supervision is not
congruent with today's more independently-minded workforce.
- Increased societal pressure on organizations
to engage in
ethical practices.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
-
Definitions
- Knowledge Management: any structured activity
that improves an
organization's capacity to acquire, share, and utilize knowledge in ways
that improve its survival and success.
- Intellectual capital: knowledge that resides
in an organization. Includes:
- Human capital - knowledge that employees
posses and
generate including their skills, experience, and creativity.
- Structural capital - knowledge that is
captured and retained in
an organization's systems and structures.
- Relationship capital - value derived from
an organization's
relationships with customers, suppliers, and other external
stakeholders who provide added value for the organization.
- Knowledge Management Process
- Knowledge acquisition: includes the organization's
ability to extract
information and ideas from its environment as well as through insight.
- Grafting - hiring individuals or acquiring
entire companies. One
of the fasted ways to acquire knowledge.
- Knowledge sharing
- Communities of practice - informal groups
bound together by
shared expertise and passion for a particular activity or interest.
- Knowledge use
- Organizational Memory
- Definition
- Refers to the storage and preservation
of intellectual capital.
- Includes information that employees possess
as well as
knowledge embedded in the organization's systems and
structures.
- Includes documents, objects, and anything
else that provides
meaningful information about how the organization should
operate.
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What is Organizational
Learning?
Argyris (1977)
defines organizational learning as the process of "detection and correction of
errors." In his view organizations learn through individuals acting as agents for them: "The
individuals' learning activities, in turn, are facilitated or inhibited by an ecological system of
factors that may be called an organizational learning system" (p. 117).
Huber (1991) considers
four constructs as integrally linked to organizational learning:
knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational
memory. He clarifies that learning need not be conscious or intentional. Further, learning does
not always increase the learner's effectiveness, or even potential effectiveness. Moreover,
learning need not result in observable changes in behavior. Taking a behavioral perspective,
Huber (1991) notes: An entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range
of its potential behaviors is changed.
Weick (1991) argues
that the defining property of learning is the combination of same stimulus
and different responses, however it is rare in organizations meaning either organizations don't
learn or that organizations learn but in nontraditional ways. He further notes: "Perhaps
organizations are not built to learn. Instead, they are patterns of means- ends relations
deliberately designed to make the same routine response to different stimuli, a pattern which is
antithetical to learning in the traditional sense" (p. 119). Or else, he argues, Organizational
Learning perhaps involves a different kind of learning than has been described in the past: "the
process within the organization by which knowledge about action- outcome relationships and
the effect of the environment on these relationships is developed" (Duncan & Weiss 1979). In
his view, "a more radical approach would take the position that individual learning occurs when
people give a different response to the same stimulus, but Organizational Learning occurs when
groups of people give the same response to different stimuli."
What is a Learning
Organization?
Senge (1990) defines
the Learning Organization as the organization "in which you cannot not
learn because learning is so insinuated into the fabric of life." Also, he defines Learning
Organization as "a group of people continually enhancing their capacity to create wha | |
1. Metaphor
