Philip Selznick - Goals Quotes

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Running an organisation... generates problems, which have no necessary (and often an opposed) relationship to the professed or "original" goals of the organization. The day-to-day behaviour of the group becomes centered around specific problems and proximate goals, which have primarily an internal relevance. Then, since these activities come to consume an increasing proportion of the time and thoughts of participants, they are-from the point of view of actual behaviour – substituted for the professed goal.

Philip Selznick
Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.

Philip Selznick
Whereas some consequences of our actions occur as planned, others are unanticipated; social actions are not context-free but are constrained, and their outcomes are shaped by the setting in which they occur. Especially significant are the constraints on action that arise from commitments enforced by institutionalization. Because organizations are social systems, goals and procedures tend to achieve an established, value impregnated status. We say that they become institutionalized.

Philip Selznick
Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals... they are expendable. Institutions... may be partly engineered, but they have also a natural dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

Philip Selznick