Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Uncertainty, Diversity, and Organizational Change
Uncertainty, Diversity, and Organizational Change
Pages 73-94
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From page 73... ...
work on technical innovation and society built on the premise, illustrated in the quote above, that organizations and social institutions strongly resist change. He argued that the combination of rapid technical innovation and organizational inertia disturbs equilibria.
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, even highly inflexible organizations can schedule adjustments far enough in advance to match strategy and structures to these changing states. Issues of organizational inertia and organizational diversity are important to understanding modern social change.
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When interest groups and social classes take collective action, they do so using specific organizational tools such as labor unions, political parties, or terrorist groups. Recent research shows that even relatively amorphous social protest movements have a higher likelihood of success if they can use existing organizations (filly, 1978~.
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From page 76... ...
Firms in these industries have relied on political muscle to obtain favorable government intervention to limit competition, as we have seen in the auto and steel industries. Success in this tactic serves mainly to further delay radical change in industrial strategies and structures.
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Because allocations within organizations are subject to intense political contest, organizational action depends on the dynamics of political coalitions. Organizational politics often makes collective action deviate from ostensible goals, from the demands of relevant environments, and from the intentions of organizational leaders.
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From page 78... ...
Although the rational-systems perspective continues to shape research on organizations, most sociological research has long made an opposing argument. As early as 1915 German sociologist Robert Michels, who agreed with Weber that bureaucratic forms were indispensable for efficient collective action, argued that bureaucracies seldom pursue their ostensible goals.
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From page 79... ...
As in the Weberian tradition, the natural-systems perspective has provided detailed empirical information about the limitations of organizational solutions to problems of collective action. It has identified the processes that distinguish organizations from machines and shifted attention away from idealized images of organizations and toward recurrent patterns of real
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gives a vivid account of the changes in organizational forms in industry over this period. Similar changes can be found in the structures of labor unions, medical care organizations, and government agencies.
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Thus, optimal organizational design is contingent on the nature of the production process and of environmental variations. When either production processes or the pattern of environmental changes shift, organizations attempt to alter their structures, according to this view.
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Finally, the ecological-evolutionary perspective states that diversity depends on the arrival rate of new organizations and on their diversity, on patterns of environmental vanation, and on competitive dynamics within organizational populations and communities. Progress in explaining organizational diversity and change requires understanding both the nature of organizational change and the degree to which it can be planned and controlled.
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In a world of high uncertainty, adaptive efforts by individuals may turn out to be essentially random with respect to future value. The realism of Darwinian mechanisms in organizational populations also turns on the degree to which change in organizational structures can be controlled by leaders.
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Thus, it may be useful in analyzing patterns of long-term change in organizational forms to supplement Larmarckian theories with Darwinian ones. The fact that members of organizations plan rationally for change and that organizations often develop structures designed to plan and implement change does not undercut the value of this view as long as organizations are political coalitions and environmental change tends to be highly uncertain.
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Perhaps the most important is the capacity of a society to respond to uncertain future changes. Organizational diversity within any realm of activity such as medical care, microelectronics production, or scientific research constitutes a repository of solutions to the problem of producing certain sets of collective outcomes.
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From page 86... ...
Niche theories attempt to explain how patterns of environmental variations affect the evolution of niche widths in biotic communities, that is, how they affect the reproductive success of specialists and generalists. John Freeman and I have argued that many of the classic problems of environmental uncertainty and organizational structure can be recast prof
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In other words, the dynamics of organizational niche width constrain organizational diversity. Theories of organizational niche width deal with a "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none" problem.
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Analysis of death rates in populations of local newspaper firms supports this argument (Carroll, 19851. Our research group is conducting additional research on the dynamics of organizational niche width among labor unions and semiconductor manufacturing firms.
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As general societal processes of rationalization and state expansion proceed, the set of available and endorsed building blocks becomes increasingly homogeneous, and organizational diversity declines. DiMaggio and Powell (1983:147-148)
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In fact, high levels of institutionalization may be a serious impediment to innovation. Understanding the forces that create organizational diversity requires analysis of the social forces that shape attempts to create new forms of organizations and of the selection processes that apply to new forms.
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It suggests that discussion of industrial policy, for example, should pay less attention to established, giant firms than to the social, political, and economic processes that affect the rate at which new firms are started and the life chances of new firms using innovative strategies and structures. More generally, it points to the importance of organizational diversity to society and emphasizes the need to better understand how social policies affect such diversity.
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American Sociological Review 40:215 228. Niche width and the dynamics of organizational populations.
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American Sociological Review 13:24-35. 1949 TVA and the Grass Roots.
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From page 94... ...
94 MICHAEL T HANNAN Weber, Max 1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of interpretive Sociology.
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