Describing organization

People: The most important factor. “take away the people and organizations are nothing” (Weber, 1949)

Use metaphor to make sense of organization

·         Metaphor is one way of interpreting and making the complexity of everyday situations comprehensible

·         A metaphor lends a particular view or insight into a situation, one that ‘frames our understanding’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) of what is going on.

Gareth Morgan (1986) offers eight images of organizations for interpreting and diagnosing conditions and situations: Mechanistic, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, as flux and transformation, dominating instruments.

 

Organizations as machines

·         “When managers think of organizations as machines they tend to manage and design them as machines made up of interlocking parts that each plays a clearly defined role in the functioning of the whole.” (Morgan, 1986)

·         Product analogue organization maps the macroscopic structure of the development firm to the functional organization of the product.

·         Process specialization: the organizations processes, rather than the product determines the design/structure of the organization

Organizations as organisms

·         This view present that an organization has needs, exists within and adapts to an open system that impacts it.

·         It may have relations with other organizations and belonging to a type or species, may evolve over generations.

·         The organism metaphor conveys ideas of a life-cycle, health, reproduction etc.

Organizations as brains

·         Organizations as mechanistic or as organisms assume and encode very specific models of learning and knowledge.

·         Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) model represents this kind of model.

·         PDCA: a kind of ‘single loop learning.’ (Argyris, 1977)

·         A single loop learning organization designed around PDCA is good at producing and refining well defined products efficiently

·         They may not be as effective at responding to changing requirements and dynamic competitive environments. E.g. Throughout the 1990’s Kodak “kept making the process of manufacturing and distributing chemical-based film more efficient instead of devoting attention to making the shift to digital photography”

·         With brain metaphor, we can imagine that as with individuals, organizations can step out of single loop cybernetic goal directed action by reflecting.

·         Overcoming the organizational limitations of single loop learning involves (Morgan, 1986):

o   Institutionalizing review,

o   Challenging norms, policies, operating procedures,

o   Reporting on change in the operating environment, and encouraging on-going debate,

o   Encouraging innovation

·         All of which will however generate organizational tensions if single loop learning is institutionalized through the organizations structures and procedures.