Abstract
This book is about practice rather than theory; about the problems that arise in organizing and about what can be said about them that could be useful to the practising manager. However, even the most practical managers can think about a problem more easily if they have some frame of reference that will help them to decide what kind of problem it is. Like the physician looking at a patient, they need to diagnose the class of malady. It may be a defect in the circulation system, when knowledge of its working and of the imbalance to which it is subject would be useful; or it may be a digestive problem, in which case a different area of knowledge would be appropriate. They might even decide that the malady is both a circulatory and a digestive one. Admittedly, knowledge of how the human body works is much more advanced than our understanding of the working of human organizations. Even so, theories of organization can give the manager greater insight into the nature of organizational problems.
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Notes
Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (Beverly Hills, Cal., London, New Delhi: Sage 1986).
For example, G. H. Fayol, Industrial and General Management (London: Pitman, 1948);
J. D. Mooney and A. C. Reiley, The Principles of Organization (New York: Harper, 1939);
L. Urwick, Notes on the Theory of the Organization (New York: American Management Association, 1952);
E. F. L. Brech, Organization: The Framework of Management, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, 1965).
F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939).
L. G. Bolman and T. E. Deal, Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations (San Francisco, 1984; London: Jossey-Bass, 1989) in a very readable textbook with sections on how to apply different theories, split the human relations approach into two: the human resource approach and the political approach. The latter is a more pessimistic view of human nature and hence of the possibility of promoting collaboration between competing interests in an organization.
W. F. Whyte, Human Relations in the Restaurant Industry (London: McGraw-Hill, 1948).
There is a good discussion of the contributions and limitations of contingency theory in Sandra Dawson, Analysing Organisations, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1992) pp. 118–35.
E. L. Trist, ‘The Evolution of Sociotechnical Systems as a Conceptual Framework and as an Action Research Programme’, in A. H. van de Ven and W. F. Joyce (eds), Perspectives on Organizational Design and Behaviour (New York: John Wiley, 1981) summarizes these studies.
J. I. Cash Jr, F. Warren McFarlan and J. L. McKenney, Corporate Information Systems Management: The Issues Facing Senior Executives, 2nd edn (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1988) gives a perspective and advice on coping with so much more information.
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© 1993 Rosemary Stewart
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Stewart, R. (1993). Ways of Looking at Organizations. In: The Reality of Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23047-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23047-1_1
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