SOWO 804: Introduction to
Organizational Theories
Tamara H. Norris, Instructor
Management and Community Practice
School of Social Work
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3550
Nature of Human Service Organizations
(HSOs)

HSOs can be contradictory to clients and workers

Workers have a goal to help people

HSOs offer intrinsic and extrinsic benefits

HSOs can also cause frustration

Clients are the “raw material?”

HSOs process, sustain, or attempt to change
people
Human Services as Moral Work


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Moral judgments and statements of social
work
Diagnostic labels----statements of social
worth
Allocation of resources:

Rationing

The Deserving
Gendered Work

Women have been historically assigned caretaker roles

Patriarchal ideology---women as nurturers

Women are the majority of frontline workers

Conflict between women’s contributions to social work and
HSO norms and values

Devaluation of women’s work in human services: in earnings,
positions, and social status----LONGITUDINAL SEXISM?

Legitimacy issues: lack of resources, poor services often
provided to clients who are mostly poor women
The Primacy of Institutional Environment

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HSOs conform to dominant cultural, social
symbols, and belief systems of “interest groups”
in their environments
HSOs’ access to resources is dependent on their
adherence to environmental norms
HSOs’ technical proficiency matters less than the
ability to accommodate the escalating, often
competing “diversity” in their service areas
HSO rules and legitimacy are in flux
Moral Entrepreneurs and Cyclical
Legitimacy

HSOs influence public perceptions of their clients:



parents as partners
consumers as potential welfare cheats
Cycles occur within the communities of HSOs:

Support for Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC)

1996 Welfare Reform: Personal Responsibility and Work
Reconciliation Act (PRWRA)

PRWRA changed the perception of welfare from
allowing “dependency” to mandating “work”
Human Service Technologies as
Enactment of Practice Ideologies


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Technologies are socially approved and
sanctioned
State Plans are best judgments of “best
practices” that are frequently resourcebased
Measures of effectiveness involve moral
choices that are part of practice ideologies
Effectiveness is also politically determined
How so?
Client Reactivity and Service Trajectory


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Clients can react and participate
The reactions of neither clients nor staff can be
completely controlled
Many HSO services are compartmentalized and
delivered in discrete ways
The diagnosis of a client’s needs may not take into
account his/her total ecology. Why is this so
often so?
Client Compliance


Selection of clients who are amenable to
services enhances control and
responsibility
Limiting and constraining client options
improves tracking

Social control is the result

Is such control the best approach?
Centrality of Client-Worker Relations




Client-Worker relations are the core of
HSOs
The quality of these relations are critical
to service delivery and successful
outcomes
Best cooperation is based on “trust!”
But trust is impersonal and difficult to
maintain due to the often irregular
contact between HSOs and clients
HSO Forms as Moral Practices: The Case
of Welfare Departments


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Need to understand how HSOs select and
implement moral rules that guide their
work
HSOs and their workers participate in this
process (“micro interaction”)
HSO rules are also driven by political
interests (“macro interactions”)
Moral assumptions are a constant in the
welfare system
Theoretical Approaches

Rational-Legal Model (RLM)



HSOs have a clear and specific set of goals
and their internal structure and processes
represent a rational design to attain them
Internal divisions of labor, clear definitions of
roles, and levels of authority are formalized
The RLM cannot handle multiple and changing
“environmental influences”
Human Relations Approaches (HRAs)




HSO effectiveness is a function of its
goals and the personal needs of workers
The quality of “leadership” is an important
determinant of workers’ job satisfaction
Burn-out is an increasing problem in
today’s HSOs
HRAs, alone, cannot overcome political
and economic constraints
Negotiated Order and Political Economy


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Work structures are a product of
“negotiated order” among the
participating actors (clients & workers)
Services must have legitimacy, power,
and resources (money, clients, and
personnel)
“Political economy” understates values
and ideologies that transcend power and
money in shaping HSO behavior
Marxist and Institutional Theory


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Labor in HSOs is controlled through hierarchy,
standard operating procedures, and the deskilling
of jobs
The market economy impacts HSOs
Rules from the institutional environment determine
the HSO structure

Societal and HSO values are the driving forces

HSOs uphold rules by coercion and/or imitation
Population Ecology

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Groups and organizations that have
similar characteristics and structure
Focuses on the evolution of HSOs:
founding, disbanding, and change in
population
Population ecology is sometimes
inappropriately applied to HSOs and
generates inaccurate interpretations of
HSO environments
Organizational Theory and Behavior

Classical Organization Theory

Scientific Management Theory (Taylor 1917)
Four Basic Principles

Find one “best way” to perform task

Match each worker to the appropriate task


Supervise workers, using “reward’ and
“punishment” as motivators
Management’s role is “planning and control”
Organizational Theory (cont’d)


Bureaucratic Theory

Clear lines of “authority” and “control”

Hierarchical structure of power

Division of labor and specialization

Rules for stability and uniformity
Administrative Theory

Emphasize universal set of management
principles that can be applied to all
organizations
Neoclassical Organizational Theory

Hawthorne Experiment

Barnard (1968)

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Organization is a system of consciously
coordinated activities
Success depends on leader’s ability to create a
cohesive environment
Authority is derived from subordinate’s
acceptance, not hierarchical power structure
Neoclassical Organizational Theory
(cont’d)

Limited Rationality Model--Simon (1945)


Workers may respond unpredictably to
managerial attention
The scientific method has to be
rigorously applied
Contingency Theory

Chandler (1962)

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Form follows function
Organizations act in a rational, sequential
linear manner to adapt to changes in the
environment.
Ability to adapt=effectiveness
Lawrence and Lorsch (1969)

Managers should be given authority over their
domain
Systems Theory
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1928)

All components of an organization are
interrelated, changing one variable might
impact many others

These relationships can be nonlinear

Nonlinearity=complexity
Organizational Structure

Systems Theory and Organizational Structure


Relationship Patterns Among Organ. Parts

Integration

Differentiation

Structure of hierarchical relationships

Formalized policies, procedures, and controls
Relationship Between Organization and Environment

Complex environments=greater differentiation

Two-way flow of information and energy
Organizational Birth and Growth (cont’d)

Cameron and Whetten (1983)

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Four Stages of Organizational Life Cycles

Entrepreneurial

Collectivity
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Formalization and Control
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Elaboration
Land and Jarman (1992)

Entrepreneurial and Bifurcation

Reversal in strategy toward rule standardization
Organizational Birth and Growth (cont’d)

Child and Keiser (1981)

Growth Can Occur in Four Organizational Models
 Striving
for dominance with existing
field/domain
 Diversification
 Technological
 Improved
into new domains
advancements
managerial techniques
Organizational Decline

Biological Determinism( Boulding1950)

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Biological Life Cycle

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Irreversible trend toward death
Peak and decline or never reach peak
Signs of Decline

Loss of morale, leadership, planning, innovation

Conflict, secrecy, rigidity, scapegoating
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Conservatism, over-confidence
Organizational Turnaround

Biebault (1982)—Four Stage Model

Change in management

Evaluation

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Implementing emergency actions and stabilization
procedures
Return to growth
Five Process Domains—Zammuto and Cameron (1985)

Defense and Offense

Creating new domains

Consolidation and Substitution
Final Theory Components

The Learning Organization

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Continually enhancing ability to create
Community

(Godz 1992; Peck 1987)
Organization acting as a community
Organizational Morality

(Senge 1990)
(Adam Smith 1937)
Accountability, amorality, legalistic, ethics