One of the classes I took at LKY School was Organisation theory. The class was taken by Prof. Henry Wai-Hang Yee who's sincere, enthusiastic about his stuff and did a nice job. He’s now at the University of Hong Kong (http://www.ppaweb.hku.hk/f/henryyee ).
One definition of Organisation theory is “an attempt to explain and predict how organisations and the people in them will behave in varying organisational structures, cultures and circumstances”. However there is no theory of organisations, but a multitude of theories. The field of organisation theory is pretty fragmented with a variety of schools. “Each school is at odds with the others, each defends its own position, each claims that the others have major deficiencies”. Its a wonder that any progress gets made at all in this mess. I guess the variety of circumstances of human existence are wide enough to merit the range of theories and each has some sphere of validity.
Reading academic papers in organisation theory can be pretty depressing work. There’s rarely any maths, so they’re wordy. They tend to be dense and theoretical with few examples. Things are pretty fuzzy and conceptual and usually not very convincing. The questions that they try to address in the first place are usually theoretical and not very interesting.
I tried to crystallise some general things to say about Organisation theory for this post but found it difficult. So instead, I thought I would mention some of the seminal and better-written readings which might be of interest to the general reader. In this post I’ll cover some of the older readings and in a later post cover the more new-fangled stuff. You dear reader, should pick one of the articles below that fits your interest and download and read it. You might find it quite enriching.
For regular visitors to my blog here are my recommendations:
Deepak: Read the Potter and Herzberg articles
Amar: The Garbage Can model of Organisational Choice article
Suman: you should read all of them !
For regular visitors to my blog here are my recommendations:
Deepak: Read the Potter and Herzberg articles
Amar: The Garbage Can model of Organisational Choice article
Suman: you should read all of them !
1.) Max Weber on bureaucracy: Max Weber is overwhelmingly the guy most associated with the study of bureaucracy and the guy considered the father of sociology. So I was excited to have the opportunity to study his stuff. But to my surprise it was underwhelming. The reading we had seemed pretty bland, with a collection of unexceptionable observations about bureaucracy (tasks are clearly divided, there is a hierarchy, bureaucrats are people with specialist knowledge, they get paid a salary). Finally I realised that this written in the early 19th century during the years when bureaucracy was a new phenomenon and he was the first person to pin down what differentiated it from what came before. Quite a nice read if you keep that in mind.
2.) Fredrick Herzerg’s “One more time: How do you motivate employees” : On that question that all managers struggle with, Fredrick Herzberg seemed to have laid a solid foundation for the answer back in the 1960s. This is a well-written, interesting and a relevant read for most of us. As the article summary nicely and succinctly captures it:
“The things that makes people satisfied and motivated on the job are different from the things that make them dissatisfied. Ask workers what makes them unhappy at work and you’ll hear about a bad boss, a low salary, an uncomfortable workspace or stupid rules. Managed badly, environmental factors make people miserable, and they can certainly be demotivating. But even if managed brilliantly, they don’t motivate anyone to work much harder or smarter. People are motivated instead by interesting work, challenging and increasing responsibility. These intrinsic factors answer peoples’ deep-seated need for growth and achievement.
Herzberg’s work influenced a generation of scholars and managers - but his conclusions don’t seem to have fully penetrated the American workplace, if the extraordinary attention still placed to compensation and incentive packages is anything to go by."
3.) “Choices, Values, Frames” by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky : Kahneman is the winner of a Nobel Prize and one of the founders of the hot new fields of behavioural economics and behavioural nudges. In this seminal paper they introduce some key behavioural biases: like how we prefer a small certain gain, to a larger gain associated with uncertainty, and how the way a choice is stated can influence the option we make.
It doesn’t suffer from the usual vagueness and theoriticalness of organisation theory papers, but runs at a high-ish level intellectually so can be hard to grasp. But really worth the read the quality of the ideas and exposition.
4.) Michael Porter on Strategy: This is a landmark management paper and would be familiar to MBA types. Potter lays out pretty compelling vision for what 'strategy' is in business organisations (the ideas are applicable to other kind of organisations). Again well worth a read
5.) "A Garbage Can Model of Organisational Choice": This is an idiosyncratic paper. It attempts to create a model of a type of organisation the authors call “Organised anarchies”. The authors (all academics) propose universities as a prime example of such an organisation. Its clear that they don’t have a high opinion of how universities are run - the model is one of major randomness; of problems, and actors floating, a set of actors coalescing to try to address a problem, then coming up with a random solution… or something like that. Its been a while since I read it. If you’re a cynic with some understanding of computer simulation, this is the perfect paper for you!
Notes:
The quotes are from the introduction to the book "Classic Readings in Organisation Theory" by Ott, Shafritz and Yong
For a compilation of resources on studying public policy in general and at the LKY School, see: http://despoki.blogspot.in/p/studying-public-policy-and.html
For a compilation of resources on studying public policy in general and at the LKY School, see: http://despoki.blogspot.in/p/studying-public-policy-and.html
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