Organisation & Management notes + summary of articles
Lecture 1 – Introduction
Organisation: a group of people with some sort of ‘social structure’ (informal expectations,
authority), shared goals and technology (means and/or machinery to transform inputs into
outputs) (to reach a common objective).
Institutions: are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain
individual behaviour.
Management: getting things done through command and persuasion.
- Internal management: running the organisation: strategy, performance, personnel,
finances, ICT, etc.
- External management: engaging, interacting and maintaining contacts with the
environment (customers, clients, interest groups, networks, partners, citizens).
Public management: addresses questions that arise in organising and carrying out
managerial responsibilities in government and public organisations.
- What makes public management/organisations special?
- Is there a difference between public and private sector organisations?
- How to create public value?
Studying organisations:
Functional perspective: how organisations are used to achieve goals and objectives
(instrumental).
Institutional perspective: organisations are viewed as a purposeful structures within (an in
interaction with) a social context.
Process perspective: organisations are viewed as entities being (re-)organized, and the focus
is on the organisation as a set of tasks or actions.
Behavioural perspective: how organisations affect and influence behaviour of individuals.
The SWOT-analysis:
Examine the current position of an organisation and assess how to identify the strategic
alternatives that are most likely to generate (public) value in the future.
- Internal: strengths and weaknesses.
- external: opportunities and threats.
1. Select your company
2. Find out what the mission/ purpose/objective of the company is
3. Examine the degree of publicness of the organisation
4. Gather data (annual reports, government documents, newspaper articles)
5. Conduct your analysis
6. Formulate conclusion and take-away
Lecture 2 – Organisations and organisational structures
Baum & Rowley (2017): the different organisational systems (open, rational, natural).
Mintzberg (1980): structure in 5’s (5 types of organisational structures).
,Organisation: the structure in which we execute tasks (the system we use to transform inputs
into outputs).
Management: how to make people do things.
Public service organisations: public organisations that operate a public task.
Organisations as systems:
Inputs: material, human, financial, information.
Throughput/transformation: manufacturing, operations, processing.
Outputs: products, services, profits, behaviours, information.
Outputs inputs: feedback.
Outputs inputs: environment (complete surrounding of an organisation).
Concepts of organisations (perspectives):
Rational systems: collectivities oriented to the pursuit of relatively specific goals and
exhibiting relatively highly formalised social structures.
Natural systems: collectivities of participants who share a common interest in the survival of
the system and who engage in collective activities, informally structured, to secure this end.
Open systems: systems of interdependent activities, embedded in an environment.
Organisations as rational systems (example: McDonald’s):
- Organisations as distinct social structures (rules, roles and relationships).
- They are goal-oriented and formalised (focused on efficiency in achieving objectives).
- Focus on formal control: hierarchy (who is the boss and who follows), span of control,
performance, feedback.
- Rationality and structure (optimisation).
- Examples: bureaucracy, scientific management (one best way of working).
Organisations as natural systems (example: university):
- Organisations as organic entities with values and meaning beyond the intended
purpose.
o Similar to other social structures.
o They have informal structures as well.
o Networks within organisations.
- Focus on informal control: social relations, social exchange, friendships, adaptation.
- Informal relationships facilitate communication and getting things done, maintain
cohesion and are at the centre of political life of organisations.
- Informal norms & organisational culture.
- Institutionalism: an organisation develops a distinctive character and becomes
invested with meaning beyond its utilitarian value.
Organisations as open systems:
- All organisations.
- Organisations are not closed off from their surroundings.
, o Focus on the relationships and interdependencies between organisations and
environments.
o Open/rational or open/natural systems.
- Organisation as a throughput model: obtaining resources from environment,
processing them and distributing the output back to the environment.
- Levels of organisation:
o Intraorganizational (understanding different people, groups, knowledge and
tools in an organisation).
o Organisational (the organisation in itself, as an actor/entity, understanding
organisational processes, boundaries, activity-systems and strategies).
o Interorganisational (organisations among each other, between organisations).
- Organisational environments (sources for inputs, information, markets for outputs
and institutionalised rules and beliefs about organisations):
o Task environments: all aspects of the environment “potentially relevant to
goal setting and goal attainment”.
o Technical environments: organisations produce a product or service and are
rewarded in the market for outputs for high quality and efficient performance.
o Institutional environments: organisations are rewarded for using acceptable
structures and practices, not the quality
and quantity of their output.
Economics: explaining observed organisational
arrangements in terms of their efficiency.
Cognition and interpretation: social concept, limits the
optimisation of the work outcomes.
Power and dependence: stresses the importance of
varying interests and goals and the role of power which
determines whose interests will most likely prevail.
Technology: determines whether or not you have to
collaborate with other people or organisations.
Learning: organisations and their subunits change as a result of experience.
Complexity and computation: adaptive systems tend to sheer themselves toward “the edge
of chaos” by regulating levels of autonomy and dependence.
Rational structures: economics important, transactions to make profit.
Institutions: rationalisation of cultural rules provides a basis for constructing organisations.
Networks: perspective focuses on the content of networks of interpersonal and
interorganisational relations and the meaning of action as defined by the network.
Ecology: organisations alter appropriate features to realign their fit to environmental
demands (social, economic and political conditions).
Evolution: natural selection in biological evolution and the selective propagation of cultural
forms.
, Natural-Open Systems
Institutions:
- Centrality of cognitive elements of institutions (the rules and symbols that constitute
the nature of reality, the frames through which meaning is made, and social action
constructed) and associated social constructionist or phenomenological orientation.
- A focus on institutional effects (how organisations are influenced by institutionalised
rules and institutional environments).
- Structural and cognitive constraints: limiting organisational structures by rendering
some options unfeasible and limiting organisational members’ imaginations by
rendering some options unimaginable.
- Isomorphism (similarity) among organisations.
- Organisational performance is social: depending on conformity to rationalised rules
and requirements necessary to acquire needed social support and resources and to
be perceived as legitimate.
Networks:
- Phenomenological: it focuses on the content of networks of interpersonal and
interorganisational relations and the meaning of action as defined by the network.
- Social milieu produces social identity and shapes the actions of individuals.
- Structural and informal properties of networks and network positions can predict
organisational behaviour.
Ecology:
- As the environment (social, economic, political) changes, leaders or dominant
coalitions in organisations alter appropriate features to realign their fit to
environmental demands.
Evolution:
- Variation (blind, chance or random) Selection (selective elimination of certain
types of variation) Retention (preservation, duplication or propagation of the
positively selected variants).
Natural/Rational-Open Systems
Cognition and interpretation:
- ‘Computational’ stream: examines the processes by which organisations and their
members process information and make decisions.
- ‘Interpretive’ approach: how meaning is created around information in a social
context.
Power and dependence:
- Stresses the importance of varying interests and goals and particularly the role of
power in determining whose interests are most likely to prevail.
Technology:
- Knowledge is important for organisational performance.
- The greater the technical complexity, the greater the structural complexity; the
greater the technical uncertainty, the greater the decentralisation and lower the
formalisation; the greater the technical interdependence, the greater the need for
coordination.
