Feb. 8, 1998

There are many ways of thinking about organizations. During the industrial revolution, the most common metaphor was the organization as machine. People were cogs in the machine of a large organization and, to a large extent, considered interchangea ble. Time and motion studies were in vogue.

One of the most important theorists of the period was Frederick W. Taylor. I've just read a new biology of this fascinating man, entitled The One Best Way (by Robert Knigel. Viking, 1997). The title is descriptive as Taylor was convinced there w as one best way, and only one, to perform a task. He espoused and virtually created "scientific management." His four basic principles were:

• There is a science for each element of a person's work which should replace the old rule-of-thumb method.

• Workmen should be scientifically selected and then trained, taught and developed, rather than allow them to choose their own way of working and to train themselves.

• Cooperate with the men (Taylor says, "heartily cooperate") to insure that the work is being done according to scientific principles.

• Management holds the responsibility while the workmen do the work. This division of labor is fundamental to Taylor's principles and continues to be a fundamental principle of management today.

Taylor also suggested the use of "functional foremen," that is specialized managers whereby each workman might have several bosses, each supervising a specific element of the task. (A moden day echo of this is the matrix organization) Taylor's idea of many bosses never caught on.

Taylorism is now almost a perjorative term. We have developed machines and automated manual tasks to the extent that we generally reject the idea of equating people and machines. If any of you have seen Charlie Chaplin's old film, Hard Times, you have seen a take-off on the human as robot concept.

Another important name connected with the early days of scientific management is Henry Gantt who has given us the Gantt chart, a way of showing the relationship between work planned and completed on one axis and time elapsed on the other. Gantt charts are still used -- in fact, you may choose to use a Gantt chart to show the relationship of time to task in assignment 3.

A modern echo of this work can be found in the TQM (Total Quality Management) movement initiated by the statistician, W. Edwards Deming, about whom we may have occasion to speak later.

The "classical school" of management is an outgrowth of scientific management and the idea of the organization as a machine. Writers on this topic ask:

• What basic principles should guide the design of an organization structure?

• What are the basic functions of an organization?

One person to know about is Henri Fayol, a French industrialist, who identified many of the principles of management still espoused by textbooks, including some of the principles given in Montana and Charnov and in Stueart and Moran. Some of the more i mportant include:

• Division of Work and Specialization -- Each person has his/her own task and becomes proficient in performing it.

• Unity of Command -- No employee should receive orders from more than one supervisor.

• Chain or Command or Scalar Principle -- This is related to the former and refers to a graded level of authority from top to bottom. Information is transmitted up the ladder through the chain (without skipping steps) and communiques and orders follow the same path down.

• Unity of Direction - Each group within the organization has the same overall purpose -- "one head, one plan"

Fayol also identified the five functions in which all managers must engage:

• Planning - forecasting the future and designing an operating plan

• Organization - structure of tasks and authority
• Commanding - directing the activity of subordinates
• Coordinating - binding together individual efforts and directing them to a common goal
• Controlling - ensuring that what gets done is consistent with the plan

Following Fayol, Chester Barnard wrote a famous book in 1938 called The Functions of the Executive. Barnard is generally considered to be the first to relate the nature of the organization to the nature of the human being. Barnard stressed the n eed for goal-directed cooperative efforts and challenged total reliance on authority to achieve compliance. His "acceptance theory of authority" poses three zones for each employee: a zone of acceptance where the employee regards an order as legitimate an d unquestioned; a zone of rejection where he/she regards the order as inappropriate and refused to comply; and a zone of indifference, a grey area where it could go either way and where an influential boss can persuade an employee to greater effort while a less competent boss may drive the employee to do only the minimum required.

Today we use metaphors of the organization as a mind or as an organism rather than as a machine. Herbert Simon developed an information processing theory of organization, in which the organization is likened to a computer (which, in turn, is likened to a mind). The organization receives information inputs from the environment and processes the information in some way to add value and to create a new reality about which information is output to the environment. An important aspect of the information pro cessing view is the notion of feedback, that is receiving some of the output information back as a new information input which either suggests corrective action or encourages the organization to continue on the same path.

Systems dynamics and population ecology are other theoretic formulations that relate to the notion of the organization as an organism.

Other writers, notably Henry Mintzberg, adopt a contingency approach, in which the particular form of the organization, the way its divides its tasks and coordinates activities are variables that are dependent on the kind of technology the organization employs and the markets it confronts. Mintzberg says large manufacturing concerns may well adopt a machine bureaucratic model of organization, whereas professional groups and research organizations may wish to adopt a more collegial, mutually dependent, style of organization. Mintzberg appears to see things in 5's. He has five coordinating principles, five organizational parts (depicted in Stueart & Moran in Fig. 3.1, p. 79), five structural configurations, etc. (See his The Structuring of Organizations, Prentice-Hall, 1979).

The two principal tasks facing the manager in creating a useful organization are: Differentiation, that is dividing the tasks, and Integration, that is coordinating the differentiated elements. Here Mintzberg's five coordinating principles are useful to keep in mind:

Mutual Adjustment -- Achieve coordination of work by informal communication. Control rests in the hands of the doers. This method is used in the simplest and smallest organizations and, paradoxically, in the most complicated as well, as it is th e only method that works under extremely difficult circumstances.
• Direct Supervision - Coordination is achieved by having one individual take responsibility for the work of others. In libraries, this is often referred to as first-line supervision. A librarian may supervision the work of pages, student assistan ts, volunteers, and/or clerical workers each performing different tasks.

• Standardization of Work Processes - Here coordination is achieved by specifying the process by which work is to be performed. Mintzberg uses the example of the assembly instructions provided with a child's toy. Recipes in cookbooks are another example. Sometime part of the work process is standardized -- e.g., the cataloging effort in a university library must conform to the MARC record.

• Standardization of Outputs - Coordination is achieved when the final results of the work are specified -- either the dimensions of a product or the delivery specifications of a service. The worker has freedom to achieve the results in a variety of ways as long as the end result conforms to the results standard.

• Standardization of Skills - Coordination is achieved via standardized training. Particular skills and knowledge are learned through an educational program often before the individual is employed but sometimes through extensive training programs afterward. Mintzberg uses an example of an anesthesiologist and a surgeon who meet in the operating room and hardly need to communicate at all instead relying on their expectations of the prior training received to coordinate their work.