Week 5 Organizations, Environments and Technology

1
Week 5 Organizations, Environments and Technology

• How an organization learns about its
  environment, how it attends to the environment,
  and how it selects and processes information to
  give meaning to its environment are all important
  aspects of how the context of an organization
  affects its action (Pfeffer and Salancik)

• In what sense, if any, is it plausible to say
  that an organization learns, attends,
  selects and gives meaning?

2
Contingency Theory (Burns and Stalker)

• Mechanistic Organizations
• Specialized, routine tasks
• Formal hierarchy
• Clearly defined structure
• Top-down decision-making
• Obedience and loyalty

• Organic Organizations
• Broad areas of specialist knowledge
• Lateral communication
• Blurred and recurrently reorganized processes
• Recursive decision-making
• Commitment to collective goals

Stable, Unchanging Environment
Turbulent, Unpredictable
3
Environment-Centric Theories of Organization

• Population Ecology Theory organizations
  asvictims of impersonal environmental
  variables. Niche survival.
• Resource Dependency Theory organizations as
  active controllers of resources to control
  environments. Negotiation of exchanges with other
  organizations. Buffering (e.g inventories)
  Bridging (e.g. relationship building). Discretion
  contingent upon degree of dependence
• Institutional Theory organizations embedded in
  an institutional matrix.
• Weick refers to the term enacted environment to
  highlight how what passes for the environment
  is actively constructed through the use of models
  that aspire to identify/capture its constituent
  elements.
• Organizations become isomorphic with their
  environments to gain legitimacy as a basis for
  survival. Importance of conformity to established
  practices and procedures
• Business Systems environment is not set or
  resources or constrains but cultural, financial
  and regulatory conditions that shape intra and
  interorganizational practices

4
Technology as Element of Environments

• Technology defined as means, activities, and
  knowledge used to transform materials and inputs
  into organizational outputs (Scott)
• Is this definition too broad?
• Is technology whatever we conceive it to be?
• Technology often understood to shape/determine
  organization structure (e.g. Woodward batch
  decentralised structure mass centralised)
  and/or degrees of alienation (e.g. Blauner
  craft and process low machine and assembly
  line high)
• How plausible are such arguments?

5
Information Technology Zuboff, Smart Machine
6
Virtual Organization Verifone

• Notions of virtual organization challenge
  traditional conceptions of the organization as a
  tangible and bounded entity
• Global leader in credit card swiping machines
  used to authorise Visa and MasterCard payments
  3,300 people worldwide
• No corporate headquarters or recognised national
  origin
• Worldwide computer network provides immediate
  online access to all company information and data
• Input of programmers from Bangalore, Dallas and
  Hawaii proceeding in parallel. No downtime.

7
Take-Away

• Key Importance of Contingency and Context. How
  should these be conceived and analysed?
• environmental determinism v. strategic choice
• enactment
• Mechanistic and organic key metaphors of
  mainstream management thought
• Technologies are constructed and interpreted
  within social relations that attribute particular
  meanings and values to it
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
  present new possibilities for organization but
  also repeat pre-existing tensions

Organization Theory as exemplar of institutional
theory? Technology - impersonal artefact or
political medium?