Gay Marriage

• Max Weber: Bureaucracy is an “Iron Cage” capable of crushing human freedom and creativity

• Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy: Initially democratic organizations demonstrate increasing inequality as they become more complex

o Oligarchy: The rule of the many by the few

*interests of leaders take over the interests of the members: politics

• W. Richard Scott: Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems

o Organizations: social structures created by individuals to support the collaborative pursuit of specified goals

o

?Functional definition

?Bureaucracies are you efficient

Common Problems faced by organizations:

a.) Define (and redefine) objectives

b.) Induce participants to contribute

c.) Control and coordinate contributions: focused on producing products or outcomes

d.) Resources must be exchanged with environments: what is resource for one may actually be the product for another

e.) Participants must be selected, trained and replaced

f.) Relations with neighbors must be maintained

• Corporate Person: Idea that organizations act like and in some cases have the same rights as individual citizens

? Employment is dominated by relatively few large organizations, while most employers are small

? The largest 3% of employing organizations employ over 50% of US workers

? Yet over 50% of organizations have fewer than 4 employees

Organizational Structure Pyramid analogy

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Flat: Egalitarian

I

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Steep: Hierarchical

• Normative Structure: Values, norms. Role expectations of organizations for its members

• Behavioral Structure: Actual behavior of organization and its members

? Interrelation between normative and behavioral structure constitutes the social structure of the organization

• Formal Social Structure: Social positions and relationships between them have been explicitly defined.

• Members or participants: Individuals who in return for some inducement make contributions to the organization

?All organizations possess technology that allows them to perform work

• Organizational Environment: Everything not within organizational