Charles Perrow Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

Most social scientists consider the non-bureaucratic, or nonroutine organization to be good and the bureaucratic or routine organization to be bad (it impedes progress, is old- fashioned, is hard on its employees, etc.). But this judgment is debatable.

Charles Perrow
In a modern society, where large organizations have acquired unprecedented importance, social scientists have increasingly sought to understand the nature of organizational goals - what they are, what shapes or determines them, what their impact is upon the environment, and how they change.

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

Charles Perrow
It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate

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
What do individuals or groups of similarly hope to gain from participation in the affairs of the organization? Or, to use an awkward phrase we shall reiterate frequently, what are the uses to which they put the organisation?

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
Routine tasks... are well-established techniques which are sure to work, and these are applied to essentially similar raw materials, That is, there is little uncertainty about methods and little variety or change in the tasks that must be performed.

Charles Perrow
As an organizational sociologist, I was interested in the system characteristics of large accidents, but the discipline also made me aware of the organizational genesis of male-made disasters.

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
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
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
It [a power based model of organization] sees organizations a intentional human constructions but not necessarily rational systems guided by official goals; as bargaining areas rather than cooperative systems; as systems of power rather than coercive institutions reflecting cultural norms, and as resources for other organizations and groups rather than closed systems. If we define organizations, then, as intentional human constructions wherein people and groups within and without the organization compete for outputs of interest them under conditions of unequal power, we have posed the issue of effectiveness quite differently

Charles Perrow