1. Chester Barnard (1886-1961) followed Mary Parker Follett's major themes with a far more comprohensive theory in The Functions of the Executive. Barnard, a Bell System executive who was closely associated with the Harvard Business School, and those faculty who were involved with the Hawthorne studies, saw organizations as cooperative systems where the function of the executive was to maintain the dynamic equilibrium between the needs of the organization and the needs of its employees. In order to do this, management had to be aware of the interdependent nature of the formal and infor- mal organizations. Barnard's chapter on the significance and role of informal organizations. "Informal Organizations and Their Relations to Formal Organizations," reprinted here, provided the theoretical foundations for a whole generation of empirical research
2. accompanying the growing repudiation of scientific management as the sole body of administra tive wisdom was a challenge to Weber's "ideal" bureaucracy. Even before it was widely available in an English translation, Weber's work sired a lively debate about its underlying premises. In a 1940 issue of the journal Social Forces, Robert K. Merton (1910-2003), one of the most influential of modern sociologists, published an article, "Bureaucratic Structure, and Personality, which proclaimed that the "ideal-type" bureaucracy espoused by Weber had inhibiting dysfunctional characteristics that pre- vented it from being optimally efficient. This is a theme that has been echoed equally by subsequent empirical studies and the polemics of politicians. In the 1950s, Merton slightly revised the article for inclusion in his collection of essays, Social Theory and Social Structure, which is the version reprinted here, but the article is appropriately placed in 1940 for chronology.
3.organizations grew from small offices and shops into large corporations and government agen- cies, the disciplined hierarchies and unambiguous functional assignments of bureaucracy evolved as the ideal structural form. It allowed for pervasive control from the top of an organizational pyramid. But tight control is a good news/bad news story The good news is that it is possible to centrally moni- tor and regulate the behavior of the employees. The bad news is that there are high costs involved with excessive control and the line between tight control and excessive control is a thin one. Employees in organizational straitjackets are unlikely to exercise initiative. Like automatons-human robots-they perform their prescribed duties until appropriate bureaucratic authority tells them otherwise. A prop- erly designed bureaucratic organization can be impressively efficient even though none of its individ- ual bureaucrats are in any way exceptional individuals. This is why Herman Wouk, in his 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, called the U.S. Navy "a machine invented by geniuses, to be run by idiots" These machines, whether governmental or industrial, can be extraordinarily impressive in performance even when run by mediocre people. Thus the French novelist Honoré de Balzac called bureaucracy "the giant power wielded by pygmies. In this sense bureaucracy, far from being incompetent, is a bas- tion of super-competence-its overall performance far exceeding the quality that could otherwise be expected from its miscellaneous human parts.
4.Unfortunately, bureaucracies often have within them the seeds of their own incompetence, like a ad genetic inheritance. Robert K Merton has argued that bureaucracies have inherent dysfunctional and pathological elements that make them inefficient in operations. Merton found that bureaucracies have a "trained incapacity" This refers to a "state of affairs in which ones abilities function as inad- equacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions" According to Merton, bureaucracy exerts constant pressures on people to be methodical and disciplined, to conform to pat- terns of obligations. These pressures eventually cause people to adhere to rules as an end rather than a as a matter of blind conformance.
5.The Hawthorne experiments of the 1930s had provided the first major empirical challenge to the scientific management notion that the worker was primarily an economic animal who would work solely for money. The Hawthorne experiments were undertaken at the Hawthorne Works of the western Electric Company near Chicago. This study, one of the most famous management experi- Western from the Harvard Business ments ever reported, was conducted by Elton Mayo and his associates management School. The decade-long series of experiments started out as traditional scientific examinations of the relationship between work environment and productivity. But the experimenters. because they were initially unable to explain the results their findings, stumbled on a that today seems so obvious-that factories and other work situations are first all social situations. The workers, as Mary Parker had suggested a decade earlier, were more responsive to peer pres Follett sure than to management controls. The Hawthorne studies are generally considered to be the genesis of the human relations school of management thought, providing the first major challenge to the scientific management notion that the worker was primarily an economic animal who would b work solely for money.