Organizational Control

Control in organizations comes from a number of sources, formal and informal, cultural and environmental, but control can also be attributed to technical and bureaucratic sources. This research examines the technical and bureaucratic sources of organizational control by considering the work of four different authors writing over a period of 15 years. The goal is to come to a better understanding of how technology and bureaucracy influence control in organizations, and to determine a direction for future research into this area.

Four readings have been selected from diverse writers: Peter Drucker, writing in 1993 about post-capitalist society; Edwards, writing in 1979 about technical and bureaucratic control; John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 1979 about technostructure and its impact on the organization; and, Bensman and Lilienfeld writing in 1991 about bureaucracies and planning. These readings stretch across a time period in which much attention was paid to how organizations are structured and also during a time when significant advances were made in technology which changed the technical environment of many organizations. As a result, these readings offer insights into the business world of both of these periods and also help today's business professional understand how bureaucracy and technology can both influence the structure of organizations.

Drucker provides a historical perspective from which the other readings can be considered. He suggests that the explosio

Related Essays

Amitai Etzioni's Model of OCS Amitai Etzioni has developed a theoretical model of Organizational Control Structure (OCS) which he defines as the methods used by an organization to: (1 .... (1976 8 )

Ramifications of Changes in Organizational Behavior .... deals speci fically with the application in a health care delivery setting of McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y approach to organizational control, as such .... (7441 30 )

Organizational Learning: Mechanistic vs. Bureaucratic .... "Balancing and Rebalancing in the Creation and Evolution of Organizational Control." ORGANIZATION SCIENCE 15.4 (2004): 411-31. (NonakaITakeuchiHKnowledge .... (1098 4 )

Impacts on Organizational Effectiveness .... Gareth Morgan has also noted that organizational structure provides a source for political control. Organizational structure is .... (1483 6 )

Organizational Culture Study .... The paradigm states that concrete forces such as bureaucracies in a capitalistic society shape the foundation for organizational control. .... (6699 27 )

trusive" foremen proved obstacles to effective production rather than facilitators (Edwards 119). By the 1930s, according to Edwards, the experiment in purely technical control had largely failed and companies sought out other, more effective means of controlling their workforces. Bureaucratic control grows out of the formal structure of an organization and came into its own in the post-World War II period, the same period that, according to Drucker, gave rise to organizations as separate entities. Unlike technical control, which comes from the physical and technological aspects of a company, bureaucratic control comes from the social form and structure of an organization (Edwards 131). Galbraith takes the issue of bureaucracy versus technology and suggests that the modern corporation is, in fact, a marriage of both of these. He even coins a new name for the form that corporations in the late twentieth century take: the technostructure (Galbraith 71). According to Galbraith, the forces of technology within an organization are such that they will have an influence on control regardless of whether the members of the organization seek such influence or not. The ways in which workers perform their tasks are certain to have an

Category: Business - O