Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 5

A business firm is a human organization, composed of persons who work with some kind of coordination to achieve certain goals or results. In fact, all human organizations are no more than this: groups of people who coordinate their actions to achieve goals that everyone has an interest in achieving, although this interest may be due to very different motives.

Business organizations thus resemble families, sports clubs, city councils, the army and many other organizations precisely in the fact that they are all human organizations. Of course, all these organizations, and others that we might have mentioned, also include many aspects that distinguish them from each other.

Perhaps the most obvious way to define what distinguishes them is to look at what it is that each of them normally does. Thus, it would be reasonable to say: “I acknowledge that a business is just as much a human organization as a club where a few friends meet to play chess, but it doesn't seem to me that what they have in common-being human organizations— is more important than what makes them different—manufacturing, buying and selling something on the one hand, playing chess on the other”.

No doubt someone could point out that what is important is not this difference in what they do. after all, a business could be created whose aim was to operate a social club where people could go to play chess. The important thing is that in a business all these things— manufacturing and selling cars, or running a club for chess players—are done for a different reason than the club run by a group of friends: a business seeks to earn money; friends only seek to have fun.

Viewed from this perspective, an organization composed of a group of friends who want to have fun building cars will more closely resemble the organization formed by another group of friends to play chess than the latter would resemble a chess club run as a business, or the former a car manufacturer.

In fact, we could go on multiplying perspectives in order to define differences between various types of human organizations. No doubt, for a particular case, we would find that a particular perspective provides useful insights to account for differences which, in that particular case, are very important; but that same perspective might have little bearing on many other cases.

The aim of scientific analysis is to explain in an orderly manner the various aspects which determine whether something is or is not a particular kind of thing. Therefore, one begins by studying very general aspects or properties and then goes on to consider others which define more particular cases.

Thus, if we say that businesses are human organizations, then everything that can be said in general terms about human organizations will also be applicable to them. Of course, there will be other things that are only applicable to businesses (a particular kind of human organization) and not to other kinds of organizations.

When the human side of a business is not working smoothly, the fault should not be sought in those other aspects of the business that make it a particular type of organization, such as its size, type of activity or the nature of its production and distribution processes. For this reason, the analysis of businesses as human organizations will be very useful, since it is this analysis that seeks to explain the influence of what is happening to the human side of a business organization on the behavior of the enterprise as a whole.