Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Charles Perrow
Charles Perrow Quotes
63 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
Unambiguous pursuit of official goals is not likely to be common.
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter materials (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
Two aspects of this work process are of critical importance.
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees—up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued?
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
To call for decentralization, representative bureaucracy, collegial authority, or employee-centered, innovative or organic organizations - to mention only a few of the highly normative prescriptions that are being offered by social scientists today - is to call for a type of structure that can be realized only with a certain type of technology, unless we are willing to pay a high cost in terms of output. Given a routine technology, the much maligned Weberian bureaucracy probably constitutes the socially optimum form of organizational structure.
Charles Perrow
Source
Report...
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
1
2
3
Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Charles Perrow
Born:
February 9, 1925
Died:
November 12, 2019
(aged 94)
Bio:
Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University.
Known for:
Normal Accidents (1984)
Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (1972)
The Next Catastrophe (2007)
Organizing America (2001)
The AIDS disaster (1990)
Most used words:
organizations
goals
organizational
group
social
work
people
tasks
leadership
structure
theory
materials
human
control
technology
Charles Perrow on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Charles Perrow Quotes
Charles Perrow Short Quotes
American Sociologist Quotes
Sociologist Quotes
20th-century Sociologist Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes