Org Theory Flashcards
Scott and Davis (2006)
Summary: Provides an overview of organizations as an area of study.
Major Contribution 1: Area started as the study of individual organizations without taking into account patterns, power structures, etc. Replaced “all powerful” individuals with the study of boundedly rational actors.
Major Contribution 2: Rational v. Natural v. Open systems.
Rational = conscious and deliberate cooperation
Natural = divergent goals but united under the goal of perpetuating an organization.
Open = independent flows and activities linking shifting coalitions of participants from wider environments.
Major Contribution 3: Elements of orgs = environment, strategy, work, formal organization, informal organization, people.
Bacharach (1989)
Summary: Defining what constitutes an organizational theory.
Major Contribution 1: Conceptual clarity is needed in order to propose a theory and make a theoretical contribution.
Major Contribution 2: Theory = a system of constructs and variables in which the constructs are related to each other by propositions and the variables are related to each other by hypotheses. Bounded by assumptions, space, and time.
Major Contribution 3: Theories are falsifiable. Both their constructs and variables.
Sutton & Staw (1995)
Summary: Title “What theory is not” explains it – goes into a list of things commonly mistaken for theories.
Major Contribution 1: References, data, variables, diagrams, hypotheses are NOT theory.
Major Contribution 2: theory is: “a delve into the underlying processes to understand systematic reasons for a particular occurrence or nonoccurrence.”
Corley and Gioia (2011)
Summary: Discusses theory building.
Major Contribution 1: Two dimensions of a theoretical contribution are originality and utility.
Major Contribution 2: Originality = value added based on contributing something new to a discussion.
Major Contribution 3: Scientific utility = improving conceptual rigor.
Practical utility = can be applied to problems that people in real life face.
Weber (1978)
Summary: Discusses power, domination, legitimacy, and bureaucracy
Major Contribution 1: Three forms of legitimacy which grants the ability to dominate: Legal-rational, traditional, charismatic. Root of domination is belief in myth of natural superiority.
Major Contribution 2: Bureaucracy – structures that are highly regimented and segregated, where the roles are more important than the individuals who inhabit them. People are replaceable within specific roles.
Major Contribution 3: Bureaucracy accompanies mass democracy and usually comes into power on the basis of leveling social/economic differences.
Perrow (1986)
Summary: Outline critiques of bureaucracy, rooted in example of a wallboard plant that was “bureaucratized” by a new manager.
Major Contribution 1: Critiques of bureaucracy – unadaptive, stifles humanity of employees, legitimizes the centralization of power.
Major Contribution 2: Difference between stated and latent goals. Bureaucracies (such as Greek orgs) can state that they “supplement the educational experience” but in reality maintain class and culture hierarchy.
Major Contribution 3:
There needs to be a balance between controlling leadership (bad) and organized structure (necessary). There is always an unofficial hierarchy outside of the organizational map anyways.
Adler and Borys (1996)
Summary: Article proposes a conceptualization of workflow formalization that helps reconcile contrasting assessments of bureaucracy as alienating to employees or as enabling them to perform their tasks better.
Major Contribution 1: Conflicting views of bureaucracy. On one hand – stifles creativity and demotivates. On other hands – provides guidance and clarifies responsibilities.
Major Contribution 2: Coercive bureaucracy = built on detail and surveillance without rationale.
Enabling bureaucracy = built on transparency, visibility in process, connection between individual tasks and organizational success.
Major Contribution 3: We see a false dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We can design procedures in a way that delivers efficiency without enslavement.
Briscoe (2007)
Summary: Not a major paper for me, but an instance of when bureaucracy increased flexibility.
Major Contribution 1: Policies enabled handoffs between jobs, and knowledge sharing about clients that made jobs and work hours more flexible.
Major Contribution 2: Bureaucratic orgs can enhance temporal flexibility by acting as a shield against the demands of work.
Lawrence and Lorsch (1967)
Summary: Six orgs
Subsystems (sales, research, production) differentiated by formal structures, members’ goal orientations, members’ time orientations, members’ interpersonal orientations.
Investigated how orgs were highly differentiated and integrated at the same time
Major Contribution 1: Differentiation and integration = specialized roles but overall cohesiveness. RQ – what balance of this is most effective?
Major Contribution 2: Built on work that showed teams do well with varying degrees of structure based on task. Treats individuals as “feeling, reasoning, motivated beings.”
Major Contribution 3:
Miller (1986)
Summary: This paper proposes a new approach to examine the relationship between strategy and structure by proposing some functional linkages between strategic and structural configurations.
Major Contribution 1: It had traditionally been accepted that changes in strategy required changes in structure. Previous literature explored the ACT of enacting new strategy and not its content.
Major Contribution 2: Proposed a categorization system for orgs with natural congruences between strategy, structure, and environmental configuration.
Major Contribution 3: Strategic variable dimensions = differentiation, focus, cost leadership, asset parsimony
Siggelkow (2001)
Summary: New framework addresses how tight fit among a firm’s activities affects the firm’s ability to react to environmental changes.
Argument: fit-conserving change, leaving the internal fit in tact while decreasing appropriateness of the set of choice as a whole poses a particularly difficult challenge.
Major Contribution 1: Fit in contingency theory = relationship between org’s choices and its environment. Difficult for tight fit orgs to change, but tight fit also raises the incentive to change in response to a developing external environment.
Major Contribution 2: Three responses that are fit-conserving change: playing the old game, playing an incomplete game, playing a new game.
Major Contribution 3: Need to find balance between preserving internal fit and stability and also matching the external fit with the environment.
Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004)
Summary: ooking at contextual organizational ambidexterity (definition: the capacity to simultaneously achieve alignment and adaptability at a business-unit level). Argument that a context characterized by a combination of stretch, discipline, support, and trust facilitates contextual ambidexterity. Ambidexterity also mediates the relationship between contextual features and performance.
Major Contribution 1: Ambidexterity refers to a balance of alignment and adaptability.
Major Contribution 2: Alignment and adaptability should be viewed as a “both/and” and not a zero-sum situation.
Major Contribution 3: Found that ambidexterity positively predicted organizational performance across contextual features.
March and Simon (1958)
Summary: Main argument = upsetting the traditional understanding of organizational operation. People are not perfectly rational actors, come in with different goals, and will not behave strictly to communicated sets of rules.
Major Contribution 1: Classical view vastly overstates individuals’ knowledge of characteristics and implications for decision making.
Major Contribution 2: There is no room for discretion within the framework of traditional theories of rational behavior.
Major Contribution 3: Main implication – orgs cannot be studied without taking into account the unpredictable and boundedly rational nature of the actors within them.
Cyert and March (1963)
Summary: Challenging existing theories of organizations that characterize them as single-minded organizations that seek only profit maximization. Behavioral theory argues that orgs are composed of individuals who have competing interests and ideas.
Major Contribution 1: Theories of organizations need to take into account processes of organizational decision making, resource allocation, goal setting, etc. as products of both structure and environment.
Major Contribution 2: Defining organizational goals as analogous to individual foals and decision making, accounting for changes in objectives through experiences, receptive to change and environments, etc.
Major Contribution 3: Viewing organizations as adaptive institutions, who respond to shock in the system and evolve over time. Future decisions regarding strategy, structure, and direction are informed by previous successes and failures of these decisions.
Nelson et al. (1982)
Summary: Chapter presents an alternative to orthodoxy’s view of organizational behavior as optimal choice from a sharply defined set of capabilities.
Major Contribution 1: Routine as organizational memory – org knowledge includes more than just written guidelines. it includes external memory, physical state of equipment, context of information possessed by all members of the organization.
Major Contribution 2: Routine as truce – there is an unspoken “truce” outside of written and formal agreements that relate to the amount of work done, reprimands and compliments, struggle for advancement/power, etc. The fear of breaking truce is a powerful force holding organizations to their stable routines.
Major Contribution 3: Routine as target, control, replication, and imitation. Orgs are relatively consistent in their practices/structures over time due to the memory and consistency of routine.
Cohen and Levinthal (1990)
Summary: Argument that the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovative capabilities. This ability is called absorptive capacity.
Major Contribution 1: R&D creates a capacity to assimilate and exploit new knowledge, so this is why some firms may invest in basic research even when findings are public.
Major Contribution 2: Absorptive capacity is inert – once some is developed, its easier to expand.
Major Contribution 3: Boundary spanners can integrate knowledge across technical areas, it is critical to have a balance between commonality and diversity of knowledge and expertise.
Feldman et al. (2003)
Summary: Paper challenges the traditional understanding of routines as creating inertia. Building a theory to explain why routines create change as well as stability.
People can use routine as structure and still create/modify within the bounds of that structure.
Major Contribution 1: Traditional theory held that org routines have been thought of as akin to individual habits, seen as fixed and inert. Problems = omitted considerations of agency, contradictory data in prior research.
Major Contribution 2: NEW THEORY OF ROUTINES – CONSIST OF OSTENSIVE AND PERFORMATIVE ASPECTS
Ostensive = rules, without performance.
Performative = inherently improvisational, dependent on context and individual acts.
Major Contribution 3: New understanding of routines. Cyclical process of ostensive and performative aspects, whereby rules influence actions and actions turn into patterns based on the actions of multiple, interdependent actions and actors.
Giorgi et al. (2015)
Summary: Review of organizational culture research, main findings are that culture is increasingly being studied, and an increase in popularity is accompanied by an increase in fragmentation.
Major Contribution 1: Culture has been theorized in five ways: values, stories, frames, toolkits, and categories.
Major Contribution 2: Culture and identity mutually act to reinforce and challenge one another.
Institutions are definitionally cultural because they represent more formal and structured norms and conventions.
Culture and practice are also in a bidirectional relationship and influence each other.
Major Contribution 3: Research is needed to examine orgs’ influence on broader socio-cultural dynamics.
Feldman et al. (1983)
Summary: Organizational cultures, and in particular stories, carry a claim to uniqueness – that an institution is unlike any other. This paper argues that these claims are paradoxical because organizations express thoughts of uniqueness through stories that are common.
Major Contribution 1: Common organizational stories: Is the big boss human? Can the little person rise to the top? Will I get fired? Will the org help when I have to move? How will the boss react to mistakes? How will the org deal with obstacles?
Major Contribution 2: Common themes of stories = dualities (tensions between organizational needs and values/needs of individual employees) and equality v. inequality (equality is achieved or inequality is reinforced by actions portrayed in stories).
Major Contribution 3: Organizational stories can be self-serving rationalizations of the past (success = me, failure = we)
Glynn (2000)
Summary: Qualitative field study. Exploring how the construction of a cultural institution’s identity is related to the construction of strategic capabilities and resources.
Major Contribution 1: Model constructed that explicates how the construction of core capabilities lies at the intersection of identification and interpretive processes in organizations. Process is nonlinear, nonrational, and socially constructed, particularly under conditions of crisis.
Major Contribution 2: Budget crisis brought forth identity tension and disagreement between musicians and managers in the orchestra. Musicians identified with the aesthetic aspect of the orchestra, and managers with the economic aspect.
Major Contribution 3: Individual/occupational identity and role plays a large role in determining views of organizational identity, strategic issue definition, and claimed resources.
Ravasi and Schultz (2006)
Summary: Examining how organizational culture shapes responses to identity threats and drives identity dynamics.
Institutional perspective v. social constructivist perspective. Static, who we are (sensegiving) v. identity as constantly evolving process of sensemaking.
Major Contribution 1: Environmental changes and competitive threats induced leaders to reevaluate their beliefs about org identity and the distinctive features of the organization
Major Contribution 2: Crises did in fact lead to reassessment of identity. Cultural practices and artifacts served as a context for sensemaking and as a platform for sensegiving by providing organizational members with a range of cues for reinterpreting and reevaluating the defining attributes of the organization through retrospective rationalization of the past
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological): semi-structured interviews, identity seminars, internal communications, reports and external communications.
Corritore et al. (2020)
Summary: Looks at “intrapersonal” diversity when individuals hold multiple cultural beliefs about the organization.
Major Contribution 1: Finds support for propositions that interpersonal heterogeneity damages efficiency while creativity can come from intrapersonal heterogeneity.
Major Contribution 2: Quote kinda BS “orgs with broad within-person cultural repertoires need not be characterized by high levels of between-person differences”
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological): Use language processing models from Glassdoor reviews to measure interpersonal and intrapersonal diversity in beliefs and statements regarding org culture.
Burawoy (1979)
Summary: Manufactured consent under capitalism, “making out” refers to playing a game where workers set their own goals and aim to achieve a status within an organization/job.
Major Contribution 1: The very process of engaging in a game manufactures consent with respect to its rules and legitimizes it.
Major Contribution 2: The game does not reflect an underlying harmony between the two parties, it actually creates a semblance of harmony out of an imbalanced power relationship.
Major Contribution 3: Engaging in a game obscures the process of labor value extraction that is at the heart of capitalism.
Alvesson et al. (2002)
Summary: Focuses on the regulation of identity in the examination of organizational control.
Employees are enjoined to develop self-images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially-defined objectives.
Study looks at how managerial intervention operates to influence employees’ self-constructions in terms of coherence, distinctiveness, and commitment.
Major Contribution 1: Expands studies of control that primarily focus on bureaucratic structures to take identity into account.
Major Contribution 2: Targets of identity regulation = the employee, action orientations, social regulations, the scene.
Major Contribution 3: Strategies for identity control = defining the person directly, defining a person by defining others, providing a specific vocabulary of motives, explicating morals and values, group categorization, hierarchical location.
Anteby (2008)
Summary: Qualitative study of a French aeronautic plant – demonstrate how an implicitly negotiated leniency between mgmt and workers around the use of materials and tools on company time, to produce artifacts for personal use, enhances workers’ identities
Major Contribution 1: Practice produces an engaging form of control that relies on management’s selective allocation of identity incentives. Previously overlooked type of control – one reliant on desired identities that engage rather than constraint.
Major Contribution 2: Homers = feature that requires at least tacit managerial approval. You can take them home, but they might get you sent home.
Major Contribution 3: Homers allowed for an agentic expression of skilled, independent labor. Those employees who played by the rules were granted more leniency W/R/T homers.
Ray (2019)
Summary: OT scholars usually see orgs as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race.
Article develops a theory, arguing that organizationals are racial structures.
Major Contribution 1: Race is foundational to organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Racialized orgs stratify racial groups, legitimate the unequal distribution of resources, whiteness is a credential, and the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized.
Major Contribution 2: Racialized orgs = meso-level social structures that limit the personal agency and collective efficacy of subordinate racial groups while magnifying the agency of the dominant racial group. Hierarchy, differential wages, lack of advancement opportunities, etc.
Major Contribution 3: Both external (social movements, public policy) and internal (hiring practices, diversity programs) dynamics shape racialization within organizations.
Daft and Weick (1984)
Summary: Comparative model of organizations as interpretation systems.
Four interpretation modes – enacting, discovering, undirected viewing, conditioned viewing.
Major Contribution 1: Interpretation modes are hypothesized to be associated with organizational differences in environmental scanning, equivocality reduction, strategy, and decision making
Major Contribution 2: Assumptions in this paper: orgs are open social systems that process info from the environment, individuals come and go but orgs preserve knowledge, orgs differ systematically in the process by which they interpret the environment.
Major Contribution 3:
Maitlis (2005)
Summary: longitudinal study of social processes of organizational sensemaking suggests that they unfold in four distinct forms: guided, fragmented, restricted, minimal
Major Contribution 1: Leaders engage in “sensegiving” to attempt to influence others’ understandings and perceptions of issues.
Major Contribution 2: Filled a research gap that existed previously – existing research did not explore the interactions between the sensemaking processes of various organizational stakeholders.
Major Contribution 3: Animation (seeking the input of various stakeholders) and control (organizing and tightly guiding conversations around the sensemaking process) identified as the two primary social processes that unfolded during sensemaking process.
Barley (1986)
Summary: Study of how medical devices such as CT scanners challenged traditional role relations among radiologists and radiological technologists (techs).
Major Contribution 1: Structure can be viewed as static OR can be viewed as reflections of human behavior and patterned action. Structure both constrains and is shaped by human behavior.
Major Contribution 2: Changes can set processes in motion that, over time, reshape structure and the patterns of power and responsibility in organizations.
Major Contribution 3: Organizational contexts and environments play a role in shaping how structure changes as the result of technological developments (or other alterations). Ex in this article – the change process was different between the different CT departments.
Orlikowski (1992)
Summary: Develops a theoretical model to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Model = “STRUCTURATION”
Major Contribution 1: Structuration model is at the crossroads of viewing technology as a deterministic driver of change and conceptualizing it as a tool that is completely subject to the discretion of human use.
Major Contribution 2: Technology has a unique duality where it is both the product of human action and also assumes structural properties once it is implemented/developed.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) – ethnographic study looking at how, over time, technology was integrated into an organizational setting – a software consulting firm.
Mazmanian et al. (2013)
Summary: Study examines how knowledge professionals use mobile email to get their work done and the implications for their autonomy to control the location, timing, and performance of work. Resulted in a number of contradictory outcomes.
Major Contribution 1: Short term outcomes of flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions. Longer term = intensified expectations about availability, escalated engagement, reduced ability to disconnect from work.
Major Contribution 2: Mechanisms for restricting autonomy can be internally induced (presence of mobile phones can lead to the internalization of constant work expectation). And this is further influenced by team pressure and expectations.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) - interviews with 48 knowledge professionals.
Granovetter (1973)
Summary: Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool to link micro and macro.
Argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals’ friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another.
Major Contribution 1: Tie strength defined by amount of time, emotional intensity, intimacy, reciprocal services.
Major Contribution 2: It can be inferred that those with strong ties have a high degree of social network overlap, and that weak ties can provide access to greater social contacts through somewhat dissimilar individuals.
Major Contribution 3: Weak ties are more beneficial for things such as job networks while strong ties are more useful in value-laden contexts such as community organization and social movements (people won’t trust widely disseminated information unless it is transmitted through personal ties).
Coleman (1988)
Summary: Social capital is defined as the combination of obligations/expectations, information channels, and social norms. The primary argument is that social capital leads people to behave in a way that diverges from what “rational actors” would do.
Major Contribution 1: Reconciles two contradictory but incomplete views of human behavior. Sociological view suggests that people act according to structural patterns with no internal purpose, and economic view suggests that context/environment plays no role in shaping behavior.
Major Contribution 2: Social capital can create human capital – access to people and institutions through connections can help develop skills and knowledge that reproduce both social and human capital.
Major Contribution 3: The three primary forms of social capital are obligations/expectations and the trustworthiness of structures, information channels, and norms/sanctions.
Burt (2004)
Summary: Brokerage across structural holes between groups is the opportunity to create new knowledge/shared understanding.
Major Contribution 1: In a study of an electronics company, found that compensation, positive performance evaluations, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes.
Major Contribution 2: Different brokerage levels from those in structural holes = communication, transfer of best practices, drawing analogies from different areas, synthesizing ideas from different areas/groups.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological): Generation of social network data from surveys in the electronics company.
Reagans and Zuckerman (2001)
Summary: Scholars who are pessimistic about the performance of diverse teams base their view on the hypothesis that decreased network density lowers a team’s capacity for coordination.
Optimistic view is that teams characterized by high heterogeneity cut across salient demographic categories and enjoy enhanced learning capability.
Results indicate that both network variables account for team productivity. Supports a recasting of the diversity-performance debate.
Major Contribution 1: Cautions against holding demographic diversity and interaction patterns as congruent measures of “diversity” and difference.
Major Contribution 2: Found that dense networks of internal team interaction, coupled with wide external networks and differing organization tenures, are the most productive and successful. So, you need to be connected with your team and expand your horizons outside of it.
Major Contribution 3: (Methodological) – questionnaire based, measuring team productivity (papers, proposals, articles, patents in R&D context) as success.
Aven (2015)
Summary: Uses longitudinal data of Enron emails and couples coding with social network analysis to understand the effects of corruption on communication behavior.
Contrasts evolution of corrupt and noncorrupt projects.
Major Contribution 1: Transfer of information was not different at the onset of projects, but as projects continued on, the members of corrupt projects communicated less and had fewer reciprocal relations.
Major Contribution 2: As corrupt project members’ tenure on a project increases, their behavior becomes more similar to the noncorrupt project members.
Major Contribution 3: Theories trying to explain the reversion back to “normal” coordination tactics in long-term corrupt projects = ethical decay, required coordination, and increased trust.
Leana and Pil (2006)
Summary: Exploring relationship between social capital and performance at the org level (public schools).
Major Contribution 1: Theories supported, that relationships between teachers (internal social capital) as well as external social capital (relationships between principal and external stakeholders) predict achievement in reading and math.
Major Contribution 2: Relationship between social capital and math (but not reading) achievement is mediated by the quality of instruction (measured and rated in parent surveys).
Major Contribution 3: Mediation shows that the relationship between social capital and a given outcome is context-dependent and can vary based on the nature of tasks and achievements.
Emerson (1962)
Summary: Develops a theory of power relations, bringing together terms like “power,” “authority,” “legitimacy,” and power “structures”
Major Contribution 1: Makes the argument that power is not a characteristic of a person, it is the product of a social relation.
Major Contribution 2: Balancing operations are changes in the variables which define the structure of the power-dependence relation. Withdrawal, extension of power network, coalition formation, and emergence of status
Major Contribution 3: Power relations are social ties in which one side depends on another, unlike most ties which are mutual. PAB (power of A over B) = DBA (dependence of B upon A)
Pfeffer and Salancik (2003 [1978])
Summary: We need to understand the context/ecology of organizations. Most previous scholarship has neglected the influence of contextual factors on organizational actions.
Major Contribution 1: Organizations survive to the extent that they are effective in obtaining and securing resources in the context of their external environments.
Major Contribution 2: Management can have a symbolic role, whereby managers stand for organizational values, successes, and failures.
Major Contribution 3: Organizational actions are interdependent in the social sphere, and external factors my demand certain actions from the organization. Important factors = resource importance, discretion over resource allocation/use, concentration of resources, dependence on resources
