Four Perspectives on Organizations
This note describes four images or metaphors on organizations that furnish distinctive lens or paradigms for thinking about behavior in organizations, understandings its causes, and developing programs for change. Note that each image or metaphor draws attention to a limited set of organizational properties and characteristics as critical for understanding, but pays scant attention to a host of other aspects that fall outside its purview. Thus, they concentrate attention and interest, but in a highly simplistic ways that obscures the richness of organizational phenomena. Presumably, managers equipped with the ability to view organizations through diverse lens will achieve greater understanding.
A. Organizations as Machines
This was the first image to dominate management thought about the nature of organizations. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the growth of large-scale organizations and the need to develop ways of managing......
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Approximate Pages: 5 (260 words per double-spaced page) |