Charles Perrow: The short and glorious history of organizational theory (1987)

“Charles Perrow: The short and glorious history of organizational theory”
in Wright and Robbins (1987) Organization Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

Summarized/Critiqued by Ramya T.V

Charles Perrow portrays the entire historical evolution of organizational theory as two interacting learning spirals occurring between the two main schools, the mechanical school where the organization is treated as a machine on one end of the spectrum and the human relations (HR) school at the other end where people rather than machines are emphasized. He terms these two schools as the “forces of darkness” and “the forces of light” respectively. The mechanical or scientific school began in the early twentieth century with simple injunctions to keep records and plan ahead, but factors of labour criticality, complexity of markets, environmental changes and changing concepts of leadership made these injunctions less relevant and necessitated change.

Chester Barnard in 1938 proposed the first HR theory of organizations as cooperative systems, stressing natural groups, upward communication, authority from below and the role of leaders as a cohesive force. This was further strengthened by studies at the Hawthorne plan of the Western Electric Company, published by Roethlisberger and William Dickson as Management and the Worker. Post World War II, this spawned an interest in identifying leadership traits, which focused more on the soft-skills and less on the job/technical aspects. The Tavistock Institute also studied that job simplification and specialization did not work under conditions of uncertainty and nonroutine tasks, and was followed by other conclusions, thus serving a blow to the scientific management school.

Max Weber in 1940 made available the theory of bureaucracy, which although received with hostility initially, actually turned out to be a celebration of its efficiency, considering the context in which it was proposed.

The observed aspects of power dynamics, legitimately conflicting goals and decision making processes were not logically explainable by either school. While the first two aspects were “explained” away, the aspect of decision making necessitated the next wave of change. Simon and March proposed the concept of “cognitive limits on rationality” and spoke of “satisficing” rather than “optimizing” approaches when individuals had to make decisions in an organizational context. Indirect ways of controlling decision-making with ‘premises”, along with devices to control the premises altered both schools of thought to accept a portion of each other’s views! While the HR school changed its locus from the individual’s unpredictable personality to responses to changing stimuli, the bureaucratic school began to recognize subtler and more complex elements of control.

Joan Woodward in her survey of 100 firms in South Essex pioneered the study of how the nature of the task (termed “technology”) affects the structure of the organization. While the HR school floundered in its response, the mechanical school took off on this finding with James Thompson spelling out different forms of interdependence among units, and Lawrence and Lorsch looking closely at the nature of integrating mechanisms.

With deeper studies on the nature of goals, and the influence of the environment on the organization, all the varied schools have begun to agree that organizations are systems, where everything seems to be related to everything else, and the psychological, sociological and cultural aspects of units interact. Organizations are extremely complicated and several decades of research has made a few small steps of progress in this fledgling multidisciplinary discipline.

As part of the class discussion, I would like to present my perception of three different organizations that I have worked with, in terms of aspects of these theories that I could relate to from this reading. One is a large sized India-based MNC, the second a large sized US based global MNC and the third a medium sized India based organization. This I hope will assist to some extent in confirming our understanding of the theories as well as in appreciating the realities and greater complexities of today’s organizations and their contexts.