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p.13 Organisations in Action is concerned with understanding, describing, explaining, designing and critically viewing organisations.
p.40 Among the more cybernetic models, the theory of requisite theory and its replacement of feedback by anticipation provides a significant shift towards models more analogous with social processes (Richardson 1991). In the cybernetic models the guidance and steering process is by management
p.41 Variations in the environment necessitate adaptive change of the organisation design. The aim of the designer should be to co-align the organisation design with the environment in which the firm should be situated. Because the normative theory focuses on those variables which are manipulable and important there are many dimensions which are not controllable and therefore tend to be neglected.
p.59 Systems theories are the heartland of orthodox and much current organisation theory.
p.62 each organisation is a distinct system whose future emerges from a complex interplay of actions and reactions. Complex systems can be understood much more than controlled and their future tends to have a high degree of unknowability.
p.62 Ashby's (1956) theory and law of requisite variety is another way in which different levels of complexity can be considered. The law states that for a system to survive it must possess internal capacities and mechanisms to ingest and process information that match the level of complexity in the external context. This same principle is found in the contingent theorizing about management systems in Burns and Stalker (1961).
p.68 Buckley prefers the notion of organised complexity as a collection of entities interconnected by a complex set of institutionalised and enduring relationships (Buckley 1967: 38). Thus the emphasis is not upon entities... but upon relations between elements and their likelihood of being durable or transformed.
p.68 Structuration theory presented action in the context of pre-existing structures whereby agency was partially enabled and partially constrained.
p.70 The task of sociology is to uncover the double life of social structures by crafting a set of double-focus analytic lenses (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The double analytic lens provides a relational conception and the opportunity to grasp the interweaving of the social structure and the social experience.
One lens needs to reconstruct the distribution of social and material resources and values: the species of capital. These are the determinate relations within which men and women enter to produce their social existence... The second lens embraces the pride of place given to agency (e.g. Schutz 1967) with attention to the contingent nature of ongoing practices of everyday life.
p.71 Bourdieu replaces the notion of society with those of social fields... Each field possesses its own regulative principles and particular values. The relations in the field exist apart from the consciousness of the people located in the field and the field influences their intersubjective worlds even though this is unrecognised... Fields of activity are defined around the struggle for control over economic resources and cultural capital. So fields are organised... around these struggles... The orchestration of action unfolds without being the product of either obedience to rules... or being the outcome of the conscious pursuit of interests and rational goals. Recurrent action patterns involve habits and habitual actions.
p.71 Bourdieu defines the habitus as:
The durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus. (Bourdieu 1977:78)
p.71-72 What does habitus mean?
It means that we cannot deduce recurrent action patterns from the objective conditions which the analyst might apprehend when looking at a factory or the environment of the Inuit. Regulated improvisation means generative rules which are internalised by actors on the basis of previous experience.
The habitus contains the past, present and future and assumes that within the human body there is deposited a range of situations derived from the past and providing the basis for activation. The habitus generates lines of action based on practical logic rather than the neat logic of a normative principle in organisation theory.
p.72 the social agent is characterized as having knowledge without cognitive intent (cf. Giddens 1984). The social agents acquire a pre-reflective mastery from their continuous immersion as, for example, in sports... Every configuration introduces new possibilities and alters the field.
p.77 Pre-existing structures and causal mechanisms carry the weight of the past into the present, yet the question of whether they are reproduced or transformed depends on their interplay with agents and actors.
p.79 The realists claim that visual fields are conceptually saturated. There is no perception without concepts.
p.80 The explanatory flow requires an alignment between events, mechanisms and structures.
p.84 A structure is a set of relationships and positions which has a more than temporary durability and persists over years, decades and sometimes generations.
p.84 In a realist approach it is assumed that events in everyday life which seem disconnected, random and voluntaristic are shaped by pre-existing structures which enable some zones of manoeuvre while inhibiting others.
p.98 Strategic heuristics are categories and dispositions which orient and structure a continuum of problem-solving actions directed at situations which some categories define as similar.
p.100 In the earlier debates Weber proposed that all action is oriented towards other peoples and takes into account the behaviour of others through socially constructed meanings.
p.165 Giddens's approach emphasises the mutual interpenetrating of structure and action in all social behaviour. Structures represent the persisting features which are the outcomes of past actions and which in turn are both the context and the medium through which ongoing action unfolds.
p.186 The first hundred pages of In Search of Excellence [JLJ - Peters and Waterman] are why you should all read Karl Weick and understand social rationality.
p.233 Weick introduced the notion of the enacted environment in order to develop the study of action: organisations define and respond to their own collectively and self-constructed environment. The environment requires careful specification to acknowledge that the human actors create the environment to which they then adapt (1969:64).
p.233 Weick's intention is to deliver a theoretically significant perspective on organizing based on socio-evolutionary theory... and open, loosely coupled, systems thinking.
p.234 Organisation operates with informational inputs which are ambiguous, uncertain and equivocal.
p.234 Weick proposed an approach to process and action rather than to structure and behaviour.
p.241 A capability may be characterised as the capacity to generate action, to guide an unfolding action sequence that has been 'stored' in some distributed form... There is a variety of 'forces' which operate to make a sequence of action more likely. These are the selective pressures.
p.247 The issue is how processes and action shape structure and how the causal mechanisms implicated in what we call structure shape future action. Incorporating the dynamics of action into organisational analysis requires the re-specification of an analytic language and the choice of key exemplars for the proposed language.
p.258 Knowledge is the activity and process of knowing.
p.259 Knowledge may be regarded as a tool to gather further knowledge.
p.259 Knowing is the capacity to do something
p.267 The resource based theory of strategy... assumes that the organisation can change almost without friction.
p.269 the pre-existing situation and its causal dynamics is central to the possibility of transformation.
p.272 Giddens's view of structure has to be replaced by defining structure as composed of resources which are actual and of schemas which are virtual (Sewell, 1992). Structures are not virtual.
p.272 Structure is always dependent upon agency but is emergent from structure. Agential directions to action are differently conditioned from the causal powers and liabilities inhering in structure. Structure therefore precedes agency in a sequence whereby structure sets degrees of freedom or zones of manoeuvre that place limits upon what those occupying positions in the structure should and can do.
p.274 Archer-2 proposes two basic propositions about the temporal flow of social and organisational life:
- that pre-existing structures and their causal mechanisms pre-date action;
- that action sequences pre-date the elaboration and transformation of existing structures and the emergence of new structures.
This sequence occurs in processual time, not with simultaneity, but with temporality. Therefore, structure and agency have to be viewed separately in their interplay because each possesses emergent properties and must be analysed in parallel as an analytic dualism. The outcome may be the reproduction of the pre-existing structure or its transformation.
p.275 Archer... reasons that the dualism is a theoretical requirement of explaining the processes involved in any structuring and in any restructuring as that unfolds in time... The pre-existing structures are generative mechanisms that interplay with other objects in a stratified world leading to non-predictable outcomes... The realist analysis aims to make statements about structuring without reference to the agent
p.276-277 Analysts of organisation change should adopt the three steps already identified. First they should examine the pre-existing structure... as an object which conditions action patterns and supplies agents with strategic directional guidance (Archer 1995: 196)... The pre-existing doctrines and knowledge shape the social environment to be inhabited so that the outcomes of previous actions are deposited in the unfolding situation... Second, agents interpret the pre-existing in terms of their projects and the conditions... Third, the final phase is social elaboration and this arises from the previous sociocultural interaction that was conditioned in an earlier context. The aim here is not to predict (Sayer, 1992), but instead to pinpoint the processes guiding action in a particular direction and to explain the specific configuration that arises.
p.279 Innovation and design are about continuous learning... Firms without a capability to undertake reflexive self-regulation in the relaunch of their products and services in ever renewed cycles simply disappear... and even those that do undertake innovation-design regularly fail
p.287 The analytic dualism requires attention to the pre-existing forms of temporality and to the emerging forms.
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