Test OT
In this summary the following books and articles are used:
- Book: Organization Theory Challenges and Perspectives (Second Edition)
(MC Auley, Joanne Duberley, Phil Johnson) ISBN: 978-0-273-72443-8
Ch 4 – 7 + 9 and 10.
- Additional readings:
1. Adam Smith (1776): The Wealth of Nations. London, Random house. Smith, A. Book 1, chapter 1:
On the division of labour. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-
adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch01.htm
2. Taylor, F.W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Whitefish, M, Kessinger Publishing
Company. Chapter 2 up to “The writer came into the machine-shop of the Midvale Steel
Company in 1878”. http://public-library.uk/pdfs/8/917.pdf
3. McGregor, D. (1957). The Human Side of Enterprise. Management review (Nov, 1957), pp 41-49.
http://www.psgoodrich.com/pc/docs/ARTICLES/HumanSideOfEnterprise.PDF
4. Crossan, M. M., Lane, H. W., & White, R. E. (1999). An organizational learning framework: From
intuition to institution. Academy of management review, 24(3), 522-537.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/259140
5. Lam, A. (2011). Innovative Organizations: Structure, Learning and Adaptation. Presented at Dime
conference, Maastricht.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alice_Lam2/publication/265007273_Innovative_Organiza
tions_Structure_Learning_and_Adaptation/links/54baed9e0cf24e50e9403804.pdf
6. Thompson, P. (2003). Disconnected capitalism: or why employers can’t keep their side of the
bargain. Work Employment & Society, 17, pp. 359-378.
https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy2.utwente.nl/doi/pdf/10.1177/0950017003017002007
7. Bergvall-Kȧreborn, B. and D. Howcroft (2014). Amazon Mechanical Turk and the
commodification of labour Volume29, Issue3, pp. 213-223
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ntwe.12038
8. Fleming, P. (2017). The human capital hoax: Work, debt and insecurity in the era of Uberization.
Organization Studies, 38(5), 691-709.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0170840616686129
9. Kreitzer, M. J., Monsen, K. A., Nandram, S., & De Blok, J. (2015). Buurtzorg Nederland: A global
model of social innovation, change, and whole-systems healing. Global Advances in Health and
Medicine, 4(1), 40-44.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.7453/gahmj.2014.030
,Summary book
Chapter 4 Neo-modernist organization theory: putting people first?
neo-modernism rejected the idea that people in organizations only work for economic reward. they
believed that people work in organizations for a variety of reasons – economic reward, individual
satisfaction, membership of a social group, ‘belonging’ to an organization, having a say in the running
of the organization – and for organizations to be effective, account needs to be given to these
different aspects of human motivation.
1. Neo-modernists applied the approaches and methodologies of social science to organizations
(psychology, sociology and anthropology)
2. Neo-modernist are ‘modernist’ in the sense that they understand the motion of
‘organization’ as a cornerstone to human activity, they also realized that in order to develop
effective organizations there was the need to integrate the person into the organization.
importance of management: they could manipulate employees to work more effectively for
organizations
How Roethlisberger developed a ‘practical’ organization Theory
1. insight from the social science: sociology to understand issues of power, authority and
conflict. , psychology understanding of how teams work together
2. use the methodologies and techniques of the social science: range of methods that will
provide an ‘objective’ view of the organization that will at the same time provide a deeper
understanding of the ways in which people relate to their organizations. Methods such as:
interviews, close observation, questionnaires, surveys, experiments.
Enrich Fromm: ‘human relations” = based on the wish to understand and manipulate the
employee. “happy” men work more productively and provide for that smooth operation
which is a necessity for big organizations.
3. ontological perspective, the way we see and understand the very nature of what it is to be
human: neo-modernist, their otology is humanistic: they place the human as central in the
order of nature. And organizations are systems with a key role for leadership and
management
Roethlisberger suggests that methods that are derived from scientific management and ‘professional
techniques’ can play a part in the development of means of evaluating performance. The rafts of
performance standards and measures of success or failure can be used to measure organizational
effectiveness
What is important about using these methodologies is, from a neo-modernist perspective, to use
them with a ‘human face’.
Human relations: is concerned with problems of communication and understanding between
individuals and groups and between groups. it is also concerned with the problems of ‘securing
action and cooperation within organization and the ‘maintenance of individual and organizational
equilibrium’ through processes of change.
one of the key themes in neo-modernism is that organizations need to be orderly human systems in
which conflict needs to be carefully controlled. The maintenance of a sense of equilibrium means
that people are not pushed too far out of their comfort zones in times of change, so they can
concentrate on their effective membership of the organization.
From a more critical perspective, the sociologist Stewart Clegg (1990) suggests that the stress on the
ways that leaders and managers ‘manipulate internal characteristics such as employee morale,
,motivation and teamwork’ in order to affect outputs causes it to be a relatively closed system
approach because it tends to ignore the external environment.
Roethlisberger had the view that neo-modernist organization they could be used at different levels in
order to look at different approaches to core issues in organizations, and we have adapted his ideas
to focus on four levels:
1. Level 1 – developing the organizations: neo-modernists use a range of theories from the
social sciences and use core ideas in neo-modernism to develop and understanding of the
human processes involved in change in organizations. Importance of culture. members are
engaged in the organization as a learning environment. Organizational effectiveness through
commitment of organizational members. Fundamental to this approach is the development
of understanding of organizational mindsets, the creation of new mindsets and approaches
to changing mindsets and how members think about themselves and their organizations.
‘New OD’.
2. Level 2 – Managing the human resource: psychology together with neo-modernist
perspectives leads to approaches to human resource management. Miles suggests that ‘the
key element in the human relations approach is its basic objective of making organization
members feel a useful and important part of the overall effort’. This process is viewed as the
means of accomplishing the ultimate goal of building a cooperative and complain work force.
Human resources theory assumes that ‘organizations exist to serve human needs rather than
the converse’ and there is an emphasis on the notion of fit between the individual and the
organization so that ‘individuals find meaningful and satisfying work and organizations get
the talent and energy they need to succeed’.
3. Level 3 – we are a people-centred organization: develop an organization that looks to create
an organization that members believe ‘cares’ for them. Organizations are rich and complex
arenas in which understanding members’ emotional lives is of crucial importance. This focus
on ‘people’ has a clear purpose. it is directly related to the ability of senior management to
gain and sustain the commitment of employees and the ability of employees to give
‘commitment’ . this concept leis at the heart of human relations in modern organizations
(Fincham, 2000)
4. Level 4 – the world of the management guru: the ‘expert’ who emphasizes the ‘people
factor’ in organizations.
The human relations school as an example of neo-modernist organization theory
Elton Mayo: Hawthorne studies. Mayo put forward the idea that employees work performance Is
partly dependent upon social issues, especially with regard to how work satisfaction la n recognition
and a sense of belonging rather than merely upon monetary rewards. a key implication of this stance
was that a lack of attention to human relationships was a significant gap in most existing
management theories and that managers need to develop a means of harnessing the informal
organization so that it worked in concert with, rather than against, their intentions.
The core idea that neo-modernism is based on the idea that there can be ‘practical theories’ that can
be used in order to manage the human aspects of organization.
The Hawthorne Studies a s a classic example of applied organizational research within the human
relations tradition
workers output was affected by the physical conditions in which they work. The researchers
anticipated that ‘exact knowledge could be obtained about this relation by establishing an
, experimental situation in which the effects of variables like temperature, humidity and hours of sleep
could be measured separately form the effect of an experimentally imposed condition of work’ .
Out of this series of experiments, it was realized that the variables that affect worker performance
are much more completely that had previously been thought.
They placed a great significance on the social issues involved in the quality of supervision. The study
of informal groups and the way that they operated within the formal system subsequently became
an important theme for the human relations school.
‘Hawthorne effect’ = the effect of the awareness of being researched and its impact on the subjects
behaviour. It suggested, however, that the Hawthorne effect tends not to be long lasting and that
subjects rapidly return to more routine behaviours.
Why the Hawthorne Studies were so important? They represented a crucial phase in the
development of an empirically ‘social scientific’ approach to the understanding of organizational life.
They also represent an important stage In the development of an organization theory that is
grounded in an understanding that action in organizations is based on the ‘humanness of being’ .
How neo-modernist organization theory challenges understandings of organization culture
- Creating a culture that gives meaning to work: the desire to create organizations that are
meaningful for those who work in them. the organization is a place in which there is a shared
‘sense of morale order and social collectively’.
- developing understanding of culture: as the Hawthorne studies proceeded, Roethlisberger
and Dickson way back in 1939 realized that a crucial step in the interpretation of the
attitudes of employees and supervisors was to get beneath the surface attitudes of members
to get to a deeper level – the ‘meaning or function ‘of these attitudes – such as looking at the
values that lie behind what people say. This insights contributed to the development of an
understanding of organization culture that pervades ‘pragmatic’ theory.
- developing a ‘practical theory of organization culture: They look at culture as one of the sub-
systems of the total organizational system but in a different way from the modernists. in the
discussion of the modernist understanding of culture, it was represented as a sub-system
along with the other sub-systems. to the neo-modernist, organizational culture is
represented as a sub-system that permeates the others. it is the ‘social glue’ that binds the
other sub-systems together.
organization culture is described as a system with different levels: 3 levels: 1 surface level
‘artefacts’ visible aspect of the culture (language, hears, feels, sees, easy to observe) 2.
‘espoused values’, values that are shared within the group or organization enable members
to reduce uncertainty in crucial areas of their operation. 3. ‘basic assumptions’ beliefs about
what works assumptions that members make that guide their behaviour. (Schein’s model of
culture).
- the vehicles of culture: these are aspects of culture that can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted an
touched. (artefacts) (design of offices, stories people tell (organizational sages = how the
organization has achieved what it has achieved, heroes and villains),
- The processes of the communication of culture: rituals, patterns of power and who gets
heard and ignored in the meetings, the way members are socialized into organization and are
expected to perform their roles, the taken for granted, common-sense aspects of
organizational life
