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Modern, Symbolic, and Postmodern Perspectives
Mary Jo Hatch, Ann L. Cunliffe
Organization Theory, Third Edition, offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to the study of organizations and organizing processes. It encourages an even-handed appreciation of the different perspectives contributing to our knowledge of organizations and challenges readers to broaden their intellectual reach.
Organization Theory is presented in three parts:
Part I introduces the reader to theorizing using the multi-perspective approach.
Part II presents different core concepts useful for analyzing and understanding organizations - as entities within an environment, as social structures, technologies, cultures and physical structures, and as the products of power and political processes.
Part III explores applications of organization theory to the practical matters of organizational design and change, and introduces the latest ideas, including organizational identity theory, process and practice theories, and aesthetics.
JLJ - This 40,000-foot overview of organization theory overwhelms with a tidal wave of people and their respective ideas, reveals the dis-organized state of organization theory, and is likely to turn college students away from the field. Better to explain at least one theory, such as the works of Karl Weick, in detail, and then expand into other theories. The authors do not go into enough depth with their selective presentation of the various theories, raising more questions than they answer. You are ultimately prepared to name drop - complete with the respective person's country of origin - perhaps not much more, upon completion.
The only thing "clear" about the work is the enthusiasm of the authors. Take for example, 'hyperreality', where 'illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.' Or there is the 'disappearance of man', 'decentering', 'giving voice to silence', Wittgenstein arguing that 'there can be no truth, only truth claims', and anthropology's 'crisis of representation'. Once you have mastered those concepts, there is 'Thick description', 'socially constructed reality', 'reification' (meaning to make something real - so what was it, before it was real?), 'unified diversity', the 'crisis of red tape', a 'crisis of renewal', 'Cyborganization', 'silos', 'Uncertainty avoidance' (not certain what that means, so I will avoid it), 'hoteling', 'deskilling' labor through job fragmentation, the 'third face of power', etc. I am currently trying to figure out exactly how 'Objectification' involves 'treating as an object that which is nonobjective.'
This is the only book I have read which contains, in the Afterword, the (unfortunately, appropriate) apologetic foreshadowing 'If you choose to do something else with your life...'
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p.14 this entire book addresses the question: What is organization?
p.17 This book presents organization theory, which is really a bunch of theories rather than just one.
p.35 sensemaking is not about discovering the truth, but creating it by organizing experience in ways that produce (make) understanding (sense). [JLJ - how clever to define sensemaking as to make sense. I feel so much more enlightened now.]
p.76 According to enactment theory, while organizational members may assume the environment is objectively reflected in the data they use for its analysis, analysis itself creates the environment to which their organization responds... enactment theory maintains that when decision makers respond to their perceptions, they enact the environment they imagine and anticipate.
p.78 Scenario analysis, an approach to environmental analysis pioneered at Royal Dutch Shell, provides another illustration of purposeful ambiguity creation. Instead of carrying out a rational analysis of objective environmental conditions and trends, scenario analysis asks organizational decision makers to create narratives about different ways the future might unfold and then assess the likelihoods and risks of each... as each scenario is produced... decision makers are anticipating the organization's future. This anticipation begins the process of making the environment real to its enactors
p.114 [Martha] Feldman defined routines as flows of connected ideas, actions, and outcomes and suggested that they emerge as organizational members try to understand what to do in particular contexts when facing specific situations.
p.114-115 Karl Weick... proposed viewing organizational structure as an emergent and unfolding process of interacting routines and improvisations with routines operating more like recipes than blueprints... Organizational improvisations may help the organization to react to a threat or take advantage of an opportunity.
p.138 In Perrow's system theory complexity produces unexpected interactions between components, while tight coupling between those components involving human reactions to the unexpected system interactions means that the conditions ripe for failure escalate rapidly. The inevitability of the consequences of complexity interacting with tight coupling that Perrow saw in new technology prompted him to call their failures normal accidents.
p.295 A practice can be defined as a set of actions informed by knowledge.
p.296 the habitus, according to Bourdieu, consists of socially acquired dispositions to think and act in certain ways.
p.297 Organization theorists Haridimos Tsoukas, from Greece, and Robert Chia, of the UK, suggest creating a theory of organization that assumes change, rather than stability, as its point of departure.
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