Charles Perrow - Technology Quotes

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

Charles Perrow
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
I once believed that if organizations had a better fit between their technology and their structure, they would be more efficient and thus more profitable.

Charles Perrow
Without this form of social technology, the industrialized countries of the West could not have reached the heights of extravagance, wealth and pollution that they currently enjoy.

Charles Perrow
From one point of view, structure is a part of technology; for example the spread of the bureaucratic form of organization might be said to be the most profound technological innovation in the last 3 or 4 centuries.

Charles Perrow
For many purposes of organizational analysis technology might not be an independent variable but a dependent one.

Charles Perrow