Iva Petkova
Organizing Inovation
February 7th, 2017
The company's management, Kunda reveals, uses a variety of methods to promulgate what it claims is a non-authoritarian, informal, and flexible work environment that enhances and rewards individual commitment, initiative, and creativity while promoting personal growth. The author demonstrates, however, that these pervasive efforts mask an elaborate and subtle form of normative control in which the members' minds and hearts become the target of corporate influence. Kunda carefully dissects the impact this form of control has on employees' work behavior and on their sense of self.
"This book remains the classic attempt to come to terms with the reality of work in the new economy, as it emerges to replace the alienation of mass production. Kunda recognizes, even celebrates, the autonomy and engagement of work which has grown up around IT. But he also identifies the ways management quite deliberately limits and controls that autonomy and exploits engagement. And he underscores the price which the new work place exacts from the workers excluded from the realm of autonomy, from those who become overcommitted to it, and from those who, often inadvertently, overstep its boundaries."
—Michael Joseph Piore, David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy, Mass. Institute of Technology
An organizational structure defines how activities such as task allocation, coordination and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims. It can also be considered as the viewing glass or perspective through which individuals see their organization and its environment.
Organizations are a variant of clustered entities.
An organization can be structured in many different ways, depending on its objectives. The structure of an organization will determine the modes in which it operates and performs.
Organizational structure allows the expressed allocation of responsibilities for different functions and processes to different entities such as the branch, department, workgroup and individual.
Organizational structure affects organizational action in two big ways:
- First, it provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest.
- Second, it determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization’s actions.
Types:
Pre-bureaucratic structures
They are usually based on traditional domination or charismatic domination in the sense of Max Weber's tripartite classification of authority.
Bureaucratic structures
Weber (1948, p. 214) gives the analogy that “the fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine compare with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, … strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs- these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.” Bureaucratic structures have a certain degree of standardization. They are better suited for more complex or larger scale organizations, usually adopting a tall structure. The tension between bureaucratic structures and non-bureaucratic is echoed in Burns and Stalker's[8] distinction between mechanistic and organic structures.
The Weberian characteristics of bureaucracy are:
- Clear defined roles and responsibilities
- A hierarchical structure
- Respect for merit
Post-bureaucratic
The term of post bureaucratic is used in two senses in the organizational literature: one generic and one much more specific. In the generic sense the term post bureaucratic is often used to describe a range of ideas developed since the 1980s that specifically contrast themselves with Weber's ideal type bureaucracy. This may include total quality management, culture management and matrix management, amongst others. None of these however has left behind the core tenets of Bureaucracy. Hierarchies still exist, authority is still Weber's rational, legal type, and the organization is still rule bound. Heckscher, arguing along these lines, describes them as cleaned up bureaucracies, rather than a fundamental shift away from bureaucracy. Gideon Kunda, in his classic study of culture management at 'Tech' argued that 'the essence of bureaucratic control - the formalization, codification and enforcement of rules and regulations - does not change in principle.....it shifts focus from organizational structure to the organization's culture'.
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