Images of Organizations
This text used various metaphors in an attempt to explain the characteristics of specific types of organizations. This use of metaphors is based upon the following premises. First, effective managers and professionals have to become skilled in the art of "reading" the situations they are attempting to organize or manage. Second, skilled leaders have a capacity to remain open and flexible, suspending immediate judgments until a more comprehensive view of the situation emerges. Third, all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that lead us to see, understand, and manage organizations in distinctive yet partial ways. Forth, the premise that all theory is metaphor had far-reaching consequences. Any theory or perspective is also incomplete, biased, and potentially misleading. Finally, metaphors can generate a range of complementary and competing insights with which we can learn to build on strengths and different points of view.
The machine was used as a metaphor to explain organizations. Machines now influence virtually every aspect of our existence. Furthermore, the use of machines has radically transformed the nature of productive activity and has left its mark on the imagination, thoughts, and feelings of humans throughout the ages. We have leaned to use the machine as a metaphor for ourselves and our society. Organizations that are designed and operated as if they were machines are now usually called bureaucracies.
Also discussed was the origins of mechanistic organization. Organization comes from the Greek word organon which means tool or instrument. With the invention and proliferation of machines (the industrial revolution) the concepts of organization became mechanized. Division of Labor became intensified and specialized as manufacturers reduced discretion of workers in favor of control by their machines and supervisors. Bureaucratic form routinizes the process of administration exactly as the machine routinizes production.
Another metaphor used to describe organizations is the organism. Bureaucratic organizations tend to work most effectively in environments that are stable or protected in some way. Organizational theorists identify and study different organizational needs and focus on several aspects including (1) organizations as "open systems", (2) the process of adapting organizations to environment, (3) organizational life cycles, (4) factors influencing organizational health and development, (5) different relations between species and their ecology, and (6) the relations between species and their ecology.
The idea that organizations are more like organisms has guided attention toward the more general issues of survival, organization environmental relations, and organizational effectiveness. A new theory of organization is built on the idea that individuals and groups, like biological organisms, operate most effectively only when their needs are satisfied. Abraham Maslow's theory suggested that humans are motivated by a hierarchy of needs progressing through the physiological, the social, and the psychological. Systems approach builds on the principle that organizations, like organisms, are "open" to their environment and must achieve an appropriate relation with that environment if they are to survive.
Organizations may also be explained through the metaphor of organizations as flux and transformation. David Bohm argued that the state of the universe at any given point reflects a more basic reality. This reality is the implicate (or enfolded) order and is distinguished from the explicate (or unfolded) order manifested in the world around us. Traditional approaches have been dominated by the idea that change originates in the environment. This theory suggests that in order to understand the secrets of the universe we have to understand the generative processes that link implicate and explicate orders (logics of change).
An extensive section of notes on this text can be accessed by clicking on the "Coursework" button and selecting the appropriate course - Advanced Organization Theory and Inquiry. There you will find a detailed account of each of the metaphors used to describe organizations.