Samenvatting Sociology of Organisations compleet 23-24
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Course
Sociology of organisations (201400012)
Institution
Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
Samenvatting/aantekening van alle hoorcolleges van SOO, daarnaast ook samenvatting van artikelen ( Burns & Stalkers, Mintzberg, Hatch & Schultz, Zuboff, Bovens, Sennet, Fang, Dobbin, Frynas, Watson H2&3) en samenvatting video's
Organisations = ‘Organisations are authoritatively co-ordinated human enterprises’
Sociology of organisations = ‘the study of the relationships which develop between human
beings as they organize themselves and are organized by others in work organisations, and
how these patterns influence and are influenced by the actions and interactions of people
and how they make sense of their lifes and identities’
Coleman’s boat:
Macro level structural, cultural and social
circumstances
Micro level individual preferences and agency
The market (Smith):
People pursuing their self-interest; a spontaneous
social order
Society and the marketplace are self-regulating and unintended
Six strands of theory:
1. Managerial – psychologistic
2. Durkheim – human relations
3. Interactionist – negotiated order
4. Weber – social action institutional
5. Marxian – labour process
6. Post-modern/ post-structuralist
Managerial
a) Scientific management (Taylorism)
b) Psychological humanism
Scientific management:
Taylor standardization of work
- Decompose work to enhance efficiency
- Separate thinking (employer) from doing (employee)
- Deskill: simple tasks and complex control structures
- Neo-classical economic perspective on human behaviour
- Incentive pay systems
- Man as homo calculus: economic animal
- Coleman’s boat: pure micro level
- Repeating the same task over and over makes you better at it
,Uses by production driven organisations, factories, physical work with close supervision
Fordism: Taylorism on tech (Specialised machinery / electrical tools, Interchangeable parts,
Mass production, Better wages = more consumers)
Engineers took the lead in rationalizing industrial relations
Psychological humanism:
Theory X and theory Y (McGregor)
Pyramid of Maslow:
What kind of incentive do people need to go higher in the
pyramid?
Both substrands agree that management promotes efficiency
They disagree which incentives work/ should be used
Two theory level of motivation:
- Hygiene factors
Can’t lead to positive but absence leads to negative
Eg salary
- Motivations factors
Lead to positive
Similarities substrand:
- Both describe micro level
- Sharp distinctions between management and employees
- Aim to manipulate employee behaviour
- One best way of organizing
However they have different types of assumptions of human behaviour and thus study
different incentives (economical vs psychological)
Durkheim – human relations
a) Works of Durkheim (not an organizational sociologist)
b) Human relations school
Durkheim:
- Emphasises social system around individuals
- An autonomous and externally existing society
- Social underpinning of cognition: norms, values and ways of doing
- Coleman’s boat: (over)emphasis macro level
Four phases:
- Pre-capitalist; everyone was very similar, mechanical solidarity
- Pre-industrial; social division of labour, organic solidarity
- Industrial; technical division of labour
- Post-industrial
Hawthorne effect = the effect of being observed
,Durkheim puts emphasis on:
- Informal relations
- Social cohesion
- Sentiments rather than reason
- System properties
As determinants of output
Compared to managerial-psychologistic strand:
- Macro level
- Incentives (economical, psychological, social)
Similarities:
- Sharp distinctions between management and employees
- Aim to manipulate worker/employee behaviour
- Believe (implicitly) in one best way of organizing
Interactionist – negotiated order
Goffmann
Coleman’s boat: bridging micro and macro
Organizations and members:
- Restricted by rules
- Bend the rules
What happens results from ongoing interactions between actors, leading to an order:
- Individuals and society are mutually interdependent
- Combining psychology and sociology
- Less emphasis on rationality or sentiments, more on negotiations
- Organisational order emerges from a continual process
Organisations and employees strive to preserve their identity, if they don’t succeed identity
or task must change
Phases:
1. Transgression (rule broken)
2. Return to order
3. Assumption equality dashed
4. Institutional powerplay
HC2
Weber-social action-institutional
- Interplay between objective (material) and subjective (ideas) aspects
- Modernization as continuing rationalization (Entzauberung)
- Bureaucracy is the best way to deal with rationalization
Bureaucracy = “the control and co-ordination of work tasks through a hierarchy of
appropriately qualified office holders, whose authority derives from their expertise and who
, rationally devise a system of rules and procedures that are calculated to provide the most
appropriate means of achieving specified ends” (Watson)
Weber: most rational and efficient organization possible, saves the problems of earlier
administrative systems
Three forms of authority:
- Traditional authority: sanctity, traditions
- Charismatic authority: exceptional persons
- Rational-legal authority: based on legal position and rules
Last one is where bureaucracy is based on
Could bureaucracy protect against evil because it’s
founded on the rule of law?
Weber: No, efficiency doesn’t make it morally just
Instrumental values replace substantive values:
focus on efficiency
Can lead to paradox of consequences = the
tendency for the means chosen to achieve ends in
social life to undermine or defeat those ends
Could mean limits of rationality as a quest for efficiency
Weber: we are all prisoners within the iron cage of the bureaucratic organizational form
Weber: place ideas and actions within historical context
Two faces of rationalization and modernity
Relation to Taylor:
- Wider in scope and balanced: also downsides of rationalization
- Explicitly relates micro behaviour to macro patterns
- Share a focus on efficiency
- But this strand is not so much managerial as you would expect
- Weber shows how power is constrained and made predictable in the bureaucratic
ideal type, promoting both efficiency and legitimacy (but could lead to paradox)
Institutional theories Weber:
More emphasis on dysfunctional elements of institutional embeddedness of organisations,
organizations take the shape they do, not because of their efficiency or proven effectiveness
but because people draw from the culture around them value-based notions of how things
should be organized’
Organizations are seen not as rational actors striving for efficiency but as actors conforming
to institutional pressures
- Emphasis on interorganizational fields and structural tensions
- Legitimacy trumps effectiveness and efficiency
- Mindless conformity: mimetic isomorphism (explains similarities between
organisations)
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