Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 43

The structural view has two principal intellectual roots. The first is the work of industrial analysts bent on designing organizations for maximum efficiency. The most prominent of these, Frederick W. Taylor (1911), was the father of time‐and‐motion studies. He founded an approach that he labeled “scientific management.” Taylor broke tasks into minute parts and retrained workers to get the most from each motion and moment spent at work. Other theorists who contributed to the scientific management approach (Fayol, [1919] 1949; Gulick and Urwick, 1937; Urwick, 1937) developed principles focused on specialization, span of control, authority, and delegation of responsibility.

A second pioneer of structural ideas was the German economist and sociologist Max Weber, who wrote around the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time, formal organization was a relatively new phenomenon. Patriarchy rather than rationality was still the primary organizing principle. A father figure—who ruled with almost unlimited authority and power—dominated patriarchal organizations. He could reward, punish, promote, or fire on personal whim—akin to the approach Donald Trump brought to the presidency. Seeing an evolution of new structural models in late‐nineteenth‐century Europe, Weber described “monocratic bureaucracy” as an ideal form that maximized efficiency and norms of rationality. His model outlined several major features that were relatively novel at the time, although commonplace now:

 a fixed division of labor

 a hierarchy of offices

 a set of rules governing performance

 a separation of personal from official property and rights

 the use of technical qualifications (not family ties or friendship) for selecting and promoting personnel

 employment as primary occupation and long‐term career (Weber, 1947).

After World War II, Blau and Scott (1962), Perrow (1986), Thompson (1967), Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), Hall (1963), and others rediscovered Weber's ideas. Their work inspired a substantial body of theory and research amplifying the bureaucratic model. They examined relationships among the elements of structure, looked closely at why organizations develop one structure over another, and analyzed the effects of structure on morale, productivity, and effectiveness.