Charles Perrow Short Quotes

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Two aspects of this work process are of critical importance.

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

Charles Perrow
Most normal accidents have a significant degree of incomprehensibility.

Charles Perrow
The power structure will generally dictate the operative goals of the organization.

Charles Perrow
Organization theory...has been altogether too accommodating to organizations and their power.

Charles Perrow
In research terms, the issue is to examine and explain the variations within and among residential institutions.

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

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

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

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

Charles Perrow
Organisations are viewed as systems which utilise energy in a patterned, directed effort to alter the condition of basic materials in a predetermined manner.

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
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
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
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
Chapter Five deals with the messiest problem of all— but the one to which all analytical roads should lead : the nature of organizational goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

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
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