Summary
Contents
Subject index
Organization theory is presently dominated by theories of strategic choice and politics. Managers are seen as exercising a wide range of choices while maximizing their personal self-interest through complex power struggles. For Positivist Organization Theory challenges these views, arguing instead that managerial decisions are determined by the situation and serve the interests of the whole organization. Showing that all organizations follow the same universal laws across technologies and a variety of cultures, this intriguing volume rejects the model of organizational configurations and types. Author Lex Donaldson backs up his theory, offering a critical assessment of leading organization theorists such as Henry Mintzberg, John Child, Michael Hannan, and Danny Miller--along with the satirist Northcote Parkinson. This important book will provide stimulating reading for academics and graduate students in organization, management, and administrative studies.
For Cartesianism: Against Organization Types and Quantum Jumps
For Cartesianism: Against Organization Types and Quantum Jumps
Organizational typologies hold that there are just a few, starkly different types of organizations, each constituting a fit between the contingencies and organizational structure. Further, organizational typologies see fewer fits than structural contingency theory and see structural change as less frequent and more dramatic. Thus, instead of the more usual contingency view of organizations changing incrementally through many finely graded steps, organizational typologies see organizational change as discontinuous and occasional. These points of difference will be critically examined in this chapter and organizational typologies will be rejected in favour of a multivariate model of contingency–structure fits that is in keeping with the original structural contingency theory.
Organization theory often uses ideal-types, ...
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