Lecture 4: Organizations

Significance
 Most work takes place within organizations
- Even those working from home or outside of organizations must interact with
organizations
 Understanding their structure and nature, contributes to our understanding of work
more generally

Organizations
 Organizations: a collectivity deliberately constructed (and reconstructed) to seek
specific goals
- Distinguishes organizations from other social formations (ex. Families/friendship
groups)
 Organizations are frequently defined through their characteristics such as:
- Identifiable boundaries
- Rules
- Hierarchy
- Communication systems
- Activity is goal-related and these goals may vary
- Activities have impact on organization, organization members and society

Weber
 Bureaucracy: a special form of organization (with characteristics similar to previous
slide)
- Internally divided into areas and divisions (advanced division of labour)
- Authority structure (hierarchy)
- Management based on written documents (formalization)
- Work requires expert training
- Management
o Workers follow rules that are relatively fixed and extensive
- Official business impersonal
- Efficient
 All characteristics above are linked with rationalization **
 Bureaucracies are permanent, hard to change, source of power, unequal, an “iron cage”
 Newer organizational theories emphasize other aspects:
- Internal cohesion and cooperation
- Informal relations important
- Organizational cultures
- Variability
 Positives of bureaucracies:
- Efficient, processes more people/things, more standardization (equity), clearer
rules/expectations (predictability), measurable outcomes
  Negatives of bureaucracies:
- Impersonal (cog in machine), inefficient (at times), inflexible (too rule-driven), too
advanced division of labour
- “Trained incapacity”: following rules closely can minimize flexibility, efficiency,
achievement of goals
- Rules are ends in themselves
o They are rigidity and slow to change
- Are they dehumanizing?
o They limit personal freedom
o Organizations dominant
- Robert Michels  Iron Law of Oligarchy
o The tendency for an elite to arise in any organization and impose its will on
the majority

Organizational Cultures
 Culture: the values, norms, beliefs and assumptions shared by a social group stemming
from their shared experience
- More common where workers share history and employment is stable
- Can shape worker conduct and interactions
- Can blend organizational goals and policies or not
- When workers are hired, they undergo a period of socialization
 Socialization: new workers learn and adapt to organizational norms and practices
- They are fairly stable and enduring
 Can organizational cultures change?
- Yes, but they can be resistant to manipulation
o Policies can be met with resistance from workers and fail
o Example: Total Quality Management (TQM) – tried to improve efficiency
through quality of service and product
- Change can be slow, difficult and complicated
o More likely to succeed if it occurs when: (1) circumstances demonstrate the
value of change (2) positive implications of change are emphasized and (3)
some continuity among older patterns is maintained
o TQM was more likely to succeed if they encouraged team-based work group
and participation
- Change be shaped by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and age of the workforce
o Based on formal/informal cultures
o A lesbian working with heterosexual coworkers, who frequently discusses
dates/her children will find herself in an informal setting
 Outliers (different from the norm) can feel excluded
o A “dorm room” culture existed at a feminine magazine
 Women felt pressured to reveal personal details of their life
o A “locker room” culture existed at a men’s porn magazine
 Sexualized joking and teasing were the norm
  Subcultures: culture of an organization sub-group
- Can be distinct and reflect different values

Organizational Change
 Large organizations may be resistant to change
- Example: formal policies, regulations, structures encourage inertia
- Organization must change to fit the environment, markets, consumer demands, to
survive
 Organizations also change agents
- People may be reluctant, resistant and unable to change
o Example: if workers are forced to take on more work without an increase pay
o A worker may not have the skill set to adapt to change
 Organizational policies, relationships with unions, suppliers and other organizations are
formal and set
- Quick change, then it becomes difficult again
 Change is prompted by environment change
- Employment equity laws, change in competitors
- Organizations may mimic the structure and management style of others to seem
successful
o Example: downsizing was equated with higher profits so companies started
downsizing
 Organizational cultures can be a barrier to change
- Proposed changes that go against a company’s culture are likely to fail
o A study showed workers were less likely to take advantage of policies that
enabled them to spend more time with their families
o This would have violated the company’s policy  they emphasize long hours
at work

Organizational Change
 Institutional isomorphism: change that does not result in increased inefficiency
- Results in organizations in a field coming to resemble one another
 Processes can be:
1. Coercive: elites, government may force change
2. Mimetic: copy what other organizations do
3. Normative: similarity in training, networks of institutional actors encourage
similarities

Organizational Alternatives:
 A credible alternative to bureaucracy is the collectivist (democratic approach)
- Collectives: less hierarchal, more egalitarian, consensus, work shared, community
focus
o Less hierarchal so the authority resides in the collective
o Division of labour is minimal so all members share the work
 o Members are not considered employees; they are a community for a social
cause
o More personal and holistic
o Example: women shelters/rape crisis centres
- They do have structure with clear practices for how tasks are completed
o Most successful one is the Moosehead Restaurant in Ithaca, NY
o Employees don’t feel they have a boss
o Each member is responsible in daily, monthly, yearly tasks
- There is a problem with consensus
o Can’t use majority rules as there are some winners and losers
o Must be built through discussion, argument and trade-offs
o Meetings are long and heated
 Decision doesn’t have to please everyone, but everyone has to be
willing to live with it
- Some cooperative businesses and credit unions are based on collectivist principles
o Mondragon Cooperative in Spain
o They achieved financial success, but they offer community and worker based
programs (health care, school, housing)
o Canadian companies like this: Mountain Equipment Co-op and Co-operators
Insurance Group
o Offer a way to do business with core values that reflect financial and social
goals
 Collaborative: collegial forms of organization – take turns leading
- Allows considerable worker autonomy
