Charles Perrow - People Quotes

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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
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 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
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
People's attitudes are shaped at least as much by the organization in which they work as by their pre-existing attitudes.

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
A great deal of organizational effort is exerted to control the effects of extra-organizational influence:; upon personnel. Daily, people come contaminated into the organization... Many of the irritating aspects of [[organizational structure] are designed to control these sources of contamination.

Charles Perrow
People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization.

Charles Perrow
[People-processing institutions are] a type of social institution in which human beings constitute both the raw materials and the products of organizational work. Although all social institutions are involved in some degree in people-processing activities, the term is properly restricted to those whose primary goal is the shaping, reshaping, removing, overhauling, retooling, reassembling, and recording the physical, psychological, social, legal, or moral aspects of human objects.

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