2020/02/25 SystemsThinkingTO
Chapters
2020/02/25 SystemsThinkingTO, Gareth Morgan (2006) Images of Organization – Chapters
CC-BY-NC-SA 2020 David Ing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Chapter
Perspectives
Strengths
Limitations
2. Mechanization Takes Command: Organizations as Machines
Actions preplanned, tasks observed and evaluated
Military -> mass production
-> computers
Bureaucracy, scientific management
Works on straight-forward tasks, environment stable, product repeatable, precision at premium, people compliant
Difficult adapting, mindless bureaucracy, interests of individual over org, dehumanizing
3. Nature Intervenes: Organizations as Organisms
Open systems
Adapting to environment
Org life cycles
Influencing health and development
Different species of orgs
Species related to ecology
Processes in environments
Needs, goals, ends
Different org species
Organic innovation
Ecology, interorg relations
Misses social construction
Not functionally unified, harmony
Becoming ideology
4. Learning and Self-Organization: Organizations as Brains
Learning orgs, flexible, resilient, inventive as brain
Distributed intelligence and control for self-org
Ability innovate and evolve to changes
Requirements, pathologies, designs
Metaphors to holograms, DNA
Conflicts with self-org
5. Creating Social Reality:
Organizations as Cultures
Knowledge, ideology, values, laws, rituals
Traditions from Britain, Japan, etc.
Preserves rationality, legitimizes objectivity
Shows shared systems of meaning
Org-environment relation constructed
Good / bad culture -> success?
Ideological manipulation?
Only snapshots?
6. Interests, Conflict and Power:
Organizations as Political Systems
Shadowy figures on throne, succession?
Autocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy, democracy
Interests, power, control
Recognizes rational for some, not others
Disintegrative strains
Sociopolitical implications, rights
See agendas hidden where there are none
Breeds mistrust
Plurality, classes
7. Exploring Plato’s Cave:
Organizations as Psychic Prisons
Trapped in imperfect grasp of the world
Unconscious Freudian
Patriarchy, death, shadow
Personal balanced with integration
Ethics, defense mechanisms
Unconscious vs. explicit ideology
Liberation -> utopian critique
8. Unfolding Logics of Change: Organizations as Flux and Transformation
Autopoiesis, complexity + chaos, cybernetics, dialectical tensions
Attractors, bifurcation, emergence, feedback
Recognizing paradox contradictions merits
Mobilizing desirable, minimizing negative
Innovation creates basis for own downfall
Could unleash destructive spiral
9. The Ugly Face: Organizations as Instruments of Domination
Imposing will on others
Primary labor as human capital, secondary as dispensable
Work hazards, mental stress -> radicalization
Theory for the exploited, perceived and actual
Occurs by default or by design?
Dilemma rock and hard place
-> paralysis
Non-domination possible