Charles Perrow Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

Barnard comes close to joining Roethlisberger and Dickson in their assumption that management behavior is mainly rational and workers' behavior nonrational.

Charles Perrow
While [bureaucratic] solutions have been frequently criticized by those within and without the organization, no alternative way has been found to cope with the problem of organizing large numbers of people to produce goods and services efficiently.

Charles Perrow
The concept of organizational goals, like the concepts of power, authority, or leadership, has been unusually resistant to precise, unambiguous definition. Yet a definition of goals is necessary and unavoidable in organizational analysis. Organizations are established to do something; they perform work directed toward some end.

Charles Perrow
The essence of the normal accident [is] the interaction of multiple failures that are not in a direct operational sequence.

Charles Perrow
People in these fields no longer agree that such things as norms, values, and personality really exist or account for much; these concepts may only give a false sense of order to a world that both the academic and the person in the street desperately want to order. Sociology, too, is having some difficulty swallowing the simple, obvious proposition that attitudes predict behavior. (The proposition that morale predicts productivity is just one specification of this.)

Charles Perrow
Once a definition is embedded in a program, the opinions of personnel who remain at the institution become congruent with it.

Charles Perrow
For our purposes then, the bureaucratic model refers to an organization which attempts to control extra-organizational influences (stemming from the characteristics of personnel and changes in the environment) through the creation of specialized (staff) positions and through such rules and devices as regulations and categorization.

Charles Perrow
Official goals are the general purposes of the organization as put forth in the charter, annual reports, public statements... Official goals are purposely vague and general and do not indicate two major factors which influence organizational behavior: the host of decisions that must be made among alternative ways of achieving official goals, and the priority of multiple goals and the many unofficial goals pursued by groups within the organization.

Charles Perrow
The structural viewpoint considers the roles people play, rather than the nature of the personalities in these roles. It deals with the structures in which roles are performed— the relationship of groups to each other, such as sales and production, and the degree of centralization or decentralization.

Charles Perrow
The vast proportion of the activity in organizations goes on without personal directives and supervision – and even without written rules – and sometimes in permitted violation of the rules.

Charles Perrow
The burning cry in all organizations is for good leadership, but we have learned that beyond a threshold level of adequacy it is extremely difficult to know what good leadership is.

Charles Perrow
As with all theories, we can learn something from agency theory and transaction-costs economics, since they emphasize something others hide. But as with all theories, they also distort; in fact, I will argue that their distortions outweigh the value of what they highlight.

Charles Perrow
Product of complex interactions within and between the organization's social structure, leadership groups and environment.... They are never static but subject to continual pressure and changes over time.

Charles Perrow
The hundreds of scientific studies of this phenomenon come to one general conclusion: Leadership is highly variable or "contingent" upon a large variety of important variables such as nature of task, size of the group, length of time the group has existed, type of personnel within the group and their relationships with each other, and amount of pressure the group is under. It docs not seem likely that we'll be able to devise a way to select the best leader for a particular situation. Even if we could, that situation would probably change in a short time and thus would require a somewhat different type of leader.

Charles Perrow
From the beginning, the forces of light and the forces of darkness have polarized the field of organizational analysis, and the struggle has been protracted and inconclusive. The forces of darkness have been represented by the mechanical school of organizational theory — those who treat the organization as a machine. This school characterizes organizations in terms o£ such things as:

Charles Perrow
The Basic Argument In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: when the tasks people perform are well understood, predictable, routine, and repetitive, a bureaucratic structure is the most efficient. Things can be "programmed," to use March and Simon's term. Where tasks are not well understood, generally because the 'raw material' that each person works on is poorly understood and possibly reactive, recalcitrant or self activating. the tasks are non-routine. Such units or organizations are difficult to bureaucratize.

Charles Perrow
Nonroutine tasks:... There are few well-established techniques; there is little certainty about methods, or whether or not they will work. But it also means that there may be a variety of different task to perform, in the sense that raw materials are not standardized, or orders for customers ask for many different or custom-made products.

Charles Perrow
Particularism means that irrelevant criteria like e.g. only relatives of the boss have a chance at top positions, in contrast to universalistic criteria like e.g. competences is all that counts, are employed in choosing employees... The particularistic criteria are likely to be negatively related to performance.

Charles Perrow
Frequent scheduling of mass activities in the company of other inmates, group punishment, and administering physical punishment before groups of inmates enhance the probability that inmates identify strongly with one another against staff. When, in addition, staff maintain domineering authority relationships and considerable social dishance, inmates further perceive themselves as members of a group opposed to staff, and divergent interests between these groups are more fully recognized

Charles Perrow
Organizations are seen primarily as systems for getting work done, for applying techniques to the problem of altering raw materials - whether the materials be people, symbols or things.

Charles Perrow
Some of these by-products [of official goals] may become so important to the participants who make up the institution as to constitute unofficial goals. I would not be interested in this hospital unless it... did something or other. The trouble with this place is everyone is so concerned with this or that pursuit. Where these blanks are not filled in with good patient care, teaching and research we have unofficial goals of some group or individual, and thus we have uses to which the institution is put other than the avowed ones.

Charles Perrow
Multiple leadership, as a stable system of goal determination and policy setting, is most likely to be found in organizations where there are multiple goals and where these goals lack precise criteria of achievement and allow considerable tolerances with regard to achievement. Organizations with a single goal [i.e., proprietary hospitals] or a clear hierarchy of goals provide little basis for multiple leadership. Multiple leadership arises because important group interests diverge, and each group has the power to protect its interests.

Charles Perrow
Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.

Charles Perrow
Unambiguous pursuit of official goals is not likely to be common.

Charles Perrow
It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.

Charles Perrow
The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)

Charles Perrow
Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter materials (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.

Charles Perrow
Two aspects of this work process are of critical importance.

Charles Perrow
It is surprising how much discipline is imposed upon theory by requiring that it 'make a difference' and provide guidance or useful illumination. I learned long ago from students in professional schools that questions of 'so what' or 'what relevance does this have' do not signify impatience with theory per se, much less anti-intellectualism, but only impatience with the obvious, general, remote, and vague statements that often parade as social science theory. One test of good theory is that it have practical implications.

Charles Perrow
Bureaucracy is a dirty word, both to the average person and to many specialists on organizations. It suggests rigid rules and regulations, a hierarchy of offices, narrow specialization of personnel, an abundance of offices or units which can hamstring those who want to get things done, impersonality, resistance to change.

Charles Perrow