Complex Organizations

Sociological Roots of Complex Organizations

When the Ford and Carnegie reports in the 1960s encouraged U.S. business schools to incorporate sociologists and psychologists into their faculties, the sociologists brought an expertise in complex organizations and the psychologists brought an expertise in industrial/organizational psychology into the emerging fields of management, organizational behavior, and strategy. This gradually led to the creation within business schools of hybrid scholars trained by sociologists, psychologists, and others, and these researchers trained other researchers, to the point now where the sociological and psychological roots of organization studies are difficult to trace directly to the fields of “complex organizations” or “industrial/organizational psychology.” In addition to sociological and psychological traditions, business schools around the world have drawn in a wide variety of other academic traditions including social psychology, education, political science, literary theory, and computer science. From this interdisciplinary soup has emerged the relatively coherent body of scholarship now referred to as organization studies.

There were important early attempts to describe organizations by Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, and Chester Barnard, in the early 20th century, but these were not sociological texts. It was probably not until Talcott Parsons completed the translation of Max Weber's writings into English, and sociologists such as Robert Merton, Alvin Gouldner, and Philip Selznick created a body of work in the 1940s and 1950s, that there could be the emergence of a topic of study within sociology devoted to organizations. Etzioni's A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations: On Power, Involvement, and Their Correlates, and Complex Organizations: A Sociological Reader were important early resources for organizational sociologists.

Charles Perrow, however, was perhaps the person most responsible for transferring knowledge out of organizational sociology into the fields of organization [Page 235]theory and organization studies, starting with his article “An Analysis of Goals in Complex Organizations.” Perrow's Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay was a short paperback that—together with an influential, witty, and readable journal article titled “The Short and Glorious History of Organizational Theory”—marked a transition from the study of complex organizations to the study of organizational theory.

Tightly Coupled Firms, Moderately Coupled Bureaucracies, and Loosely Coupled Networks

In the early 1990s, the American Sociological Association published a paperback titled Teaching Formal Organizations. Paul Dimaggio's syllabus within that collection was a tour de force treatment of the evolution of organizational forms, from the tightly coupled firms of the 19th century to the moderately coupled bureaucracies of the 20th century to the loosely coupled networks of the 21st century. Unfortunately, few authors in organization studies understand this historical evolution in organizational forms. A particularly problematic issue is the recent migration of economically trained scholars into strategic management slots who—for paradigmatic issues—are trained to see complex organizations as simple firms using unitary utility functions in which CEOs are equivalent to the organization, and both are rational actors. Another problem is the tendency of organizational scholars to hold onto the models they learned in graduate school. For example, Chandler's four case studies made a transition from unidivisional forms to the multidivisional form in the 1920s and 1930s, and Chandler did not write about this transition until the 1950s, but the M-form organization is still being studied in the 2000s. A third problem is the rise of “new organizational formists” who are quite willing to ignore the evolution of organizational forms and jump directly to the latest attempt to describe loosely coupled networks, such as virtual organizations, transnational corporations, and networkcentric organizations. The solution to all three of these problems is a heavier investment by organization studies scholars in understanding the complex evolution of complex organizational forms.

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