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Peter M. Blau was Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina. W. Richard Scott is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stanford University.

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Formal Organizations

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Tables.......................................................................ViiIntroduction to the Classic Edition..................................................ixPreface..............................................................................xvii1. Introduction......................................................................1The Concept of Formal Organization...................................................2The Study of Formal Organizations....................................................8Methods in the Study of Organizations................................................15The Comparative Approach.............................................................252. The Nature and Types of Formal Organizations......................................27Theoretical Concepts.................................................................27Typologies of Formal Organizations...................................................40Types of Formal Organizations........................................................45Concluding Remarks...................................................................583. The Organization and Its Publics..................................................59Professional and Bureaucratic Orientation............................................60The Public...........................................................................74Conflicts with Clients...............................................................81Concluding Remarks...................................................................854. The Social Structure of Work Groups...............................................87Informal Organization................................................................89Effects of Group Structure...........................................................100The Larger Organization and Work-Group Structure.....................................108Concluding Remarks...................................................................1155. Processes of Communication........................................................116Experiments on Communication and Performance.........................................116Field Studies of Communication in Formal Organizations...............................128Variations in Communication Patterns.................................................134Concluding Remarks...................................................................1396. The Role of the Supervisor........................................................140Styles of Supervision................................................................141Supervision and Performance..........................................................150Hierarchical and Peer Relations......................................................159Concluding Remarks...................................................................1637. Managerial Control................................................................165The Hierarchy........................................................................167Impersonal Mechanisms of Control.....................................................176Questioning Some Prevailing Assumptions..............................................183Concluding Remarks...................................................................1928. The Social Context of Organizational Life.........................................194The Social Environment of Organizations..............................................195Organizational Analysis..............................................................206Interorganizational Processes........................................................214Concluding Remarks...................................................................2219. Organizational Dynamics...........................................................222Organizational Development...........................................................223Emergent Patterns....................................................................234Dilemmas of Formal Organization......................................................242Dialectical Processes of Change......................................................250Appendix. Description and Comparison of the Two Welfare Agencies.....................254Bibliography.........................................................................258Index of Names.......................................................................303Index of Topics......................................................................306

Chapter One

This book is about organizations-organizations of various kinds, with diverse aims, of varying size and complexity, and with different characteristics. What they all have in common is that a number of men have become organized into a social unit-an organization-that has been established for the explicit purpose of achieving certain goals. If the accomplishment of a task requires that more than a mere handful of men work together, they cannot simply proceed by having each do whatever he thinks needs to be done; rather, they must first get themselves organized. They establish a club or a firm, they organize a union or a political party, or they set up a police force or a hospital, and they formulate procedures that govern the relations among the members of the organization and the duties each is expected to perform. Once firmly established, an organization tends to assume an identity of its own which makes it independent of the people who have founded it or of those who constitute its membership. Thus organizations can persist for several generations, not without change but without losing their fundamental identity as distinct units, even though all members at some time come to differ from the original ones. The United States Army today is the same organization as the United States Army in the World War of 1914-1918, even though few if any of its 1918 personnel have remained in it and its structure has undergone basic alterations.

Even when men who are living together do not deliberately plan and institute a formal organization, however, a social organization develops among them; that is, their ways of acting, of thinking, and in particular of interacting with one another come to assume distinct regularities. Neighborhoods, families, work groups, and play groups reveal such an organization of social life, and so do total societies. Indeed, the entire subject matter of the social sciences can be considered to consist of explanations of various aspects of social organization. Whenever a social scientist discovers a new principle or social pattern in what had previously appeared to be chaos-and this kind of discovery is the object of all social theory and research-he thereby demonstrates something about the orderly structure or organization of social life. The study of social classes and stratification is concerned with one aspect of the organization of societies; the study of economics, with another-for even an unplanned economy is not an economy without organization. But there is obviously a difference between a planned economy and an economy whose organization emerges as the result of the interplay between diverse forces; and there is a parallel, more extreme, difference between the way a business firm is organized and the way a relatively free market becomes organized. The contrast in both cases is not one between organization and chaos but one between two distinct principles of organization, and this contrast is what differentiates the specific subject matter of this book-formal organizations-from the general subject matter of sociology and other social sciences-social organization.

The Concept of Formal Organization

Social Organization and Formal Organizations. Although a wide variety of organizations exists, when we speak of an organization it is generally quite clear what we mean and what we do not mean by this term. We may refer to the American Medical Association as an organization, or to a college fraternity; to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, or to a union; to General Motors, or to a church; to the Daughters of the American Revolution, or to an army. But we would not call a family an organization, nor would we so designate a friendship clique, or a community, or an economic market, or the political institutions of a society. What is the specific and differentiating criterion implicit in our intuitive distinction of organizations from other kinds of social groupings or institutions? It has something to do with how human conduct becomes socially organized, but it is not, as one might first suspect, whether or not social controls order and organize the conduct of individuals, since such social controls operate in both types of circumstances.

Before specifying what is meant by formal organization, let us clarify the general concept of social organization. "Social organization" refers to the ways in which human conduct becomes socially organized, that is, to the observed regularities in the behavior of people that are due to the social conditions in which they find themselves rather than to their physiological or psychological characteristics as individuals. The many social conditions that influence the conduct of people can be divided into two main types, which constitute the two basic aspects of social organizations: (1) the structure of social relations in a group or larger collectivity of people, and (2) the shared beliefs and orientations that unite the members of the collectivity and guide their conduct.

The conception of structure or system implies that the component units stand in some relation to one another and, as the popular expression "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" suggests, that the relations between units add new elements to the situation. This aphorism, like so many others, is a half-truth. The sum of fifteen apples, for example, is no more than fifteen times one apple. But a block of ice is more than the sum of the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that compose it. In the case of the apples, there exist no linkages or relations between the units comprising the whole. In the case of the ice, however, specific connections have been formed between H and O atoms and among [H.sub.2]O molecules that distinguish ice from hydrogen and oxygen, on the one hand, and from water, on the other. Similarly, a busload of passengers does not constitute a group, since no social relations unify individuals into a common structure. But a busload of club members on a Sunday outing is a group, because a network of social relations links the members into a social structure, a structure which is an emergent characteristic of the collectivity that cannot be reduced to the attributes of its individual members. In short, a network of social relations transforms an aggregate of individuals into a group (or an aggregate of groups into a larger social structure), and the group is more than the sum of the individuals composing it since the structure of social relations is an emergent element that influences the conduct of individuals.

To indicate the nature of social relations, we can briefly dissect this concept. Social relations involve, first, patterns of social interaction: the frequency and duration of the contacts between people, the tendency to initiate these contacts, the direction of influence between persons, the degree of cooperation, and so forth. Second, social relations entail people's sentiments to one another, such as feelings of attraction, respect, and hostility. The differential distribution of social relations in a group, finally, defines its status structure. Each member's status in the group depends on his relations with the others-their sentiments toward and interaction with him. As a result, integrated members become differentiated from isolates, those who are widely respected from those who are not highly regarded, and leaders from followers. In addition to these relations between individuals within groups, relations also develop between groups, relations that are a source of still another aspect of social status, since the standing of the group in the larger social system becomes part of the status of any of its members. An obvious example is the significance that membership in an ethnic minority, say, Puerto Rican, has for an individual's social status.

The networks of social relations between individuals and groups, and the status structure defined by them, constitute the core of the social organization of a collectivity, but not the whole of it. The other main dimension of social organization is a system of shared beliefs and orientations, which serve as standards for human conduct. In the course of social interaction common notions arise as to how people should act and interact and what objectives are worthy of attainment. First, common values crystallize, values that govern the goals for which men strive-their ideals and their ideas of what is desirable-such as our belief in democracy or the importance financial success assumes in our thinking. Second, social norms develop-that is, common expectations concerning how people ought to behave-and social sanctions are used to discourage violations of these norms. These socially sanctioned rules of conduct vary in significance from moral principles or mores, as Sumner calls them, to mere customs or folkways. If values define the ends of human conduct, norms distinguish behavior that is a legitimate means for achieving these ends from behavior that is illegitimate. Finally, aside from the norms to which everybody is expected to conform, differential role expectations also emerge, expectations that become associated with various social positions. Only women in our society are expected to wear skirts, for example. Or, the respected leader of a group is expected to make suggestions, and the other members will turn to him in times of difficulties, whereas group members who have not earned the respect of others are expected to refrain from making suggestions and generally to participate little in group discussions.

These two dimensions of social organization-the networks of social relations and the shared orientations-are often referred to as the social structure and the culture, respectively. Every society has a complex social structure and a complex culture, and every community within a society can be characterized by these two dimensions of social organization, and so can every group within a community (except that the specific term "culture" is reserved for the largest social systems). The prevailing cultural standards and the structure of social relations serve to organize human conduct in the collectivity. As people conform more or less closely to the expectations of their fellows, and as the degree of their conformity in turn influences their relations with others and their social status, and as their status in further turn affects their inclinations to adhere to social norms and their chances to achieve valued objectives, their patterns of behavior become socially organized.

In contrast to the social organization that emerges whenever men are living together, there are organizations that have been deliberately established for a certain purpose. If the accomplishment of an objective requires collective effort, men set up an organization designed to coordinate the activities of many persons and to furnish incentives for others to join them for this purpose. For example, business concerns are established in order to produce goods that can be sold for a profit, and workers organize unions in order to increase their bargaining power with employers. In these cases, the goals to be achieved, the rules the members of the organization are expected to follow, and the status structure that defines the relations between them (the organizational chart) have not spontaneously emerged in the course of social interaction but have been consciously designed a priori to anticipate and guide interaction and activities. Since the distinctive characteristic of these organizations is that they have been formally established for the explicit purpose of achieving certain goals, the term "formal organizations" is used to designate them. And this formal establishment for explicit purpose is the criterion that distinguishes our subject matter from the study of social organization in general.

Formal Organization and Informal Organization. The fact that an organization has been formally established, however, does not mean that all activities and interactions of its members conform strictly to the official blueprint. Regardless of the time and effort devoted by management to designing a rational organization chart and elaborate procedure manuals, this official plan can never completely determine the conduct and social relations of the organization's members. Stephen Vincent Benet illustrates this limitation when he contrasts the military blueprint with military action:

If you take a flat map And move wooden blocks upon it strategically, The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should. The science of war is moving live men like blocks. And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment. But it takes time to mold your men into blocks And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush, They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries, And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.

In every formal organization there arise informal organizations. The constituent groups of the organization, like all groups, develop their own practices, values, norms, and social relations as their members live and work together. The roots of these informal systems are embedded in the formal organization itself and nurtured by the very formality of its arrangements. Official rules must be general to have sufficient scope to cover the multitude of situations that may arise. But the application of these general rules to particular cases often poses problems of judgment, and informal practices tend to emerge that provide solutions for these problems. Decisions not anticipated by official regulations must frequently be made, particularly in times of change, and here again unofficial practices are likely to furnish guides for decisions long before the formal rules have been adapted to the changing circumstances. Moreover, unofficial norms are apt to develop that regulate performance and productivity. Finally, complex networks of social relations and informal status structures emerge, within groups and between them, which are influenced by many factors besides the organizational chart, for example by the background characteristics of various persons, their abilities, their willingness to help others, and their conformity to group norms. But to say that these informal structures are not completely determined by the formal institution is not to say that they are entirely independent of it. For informal organizations develop in response to the opportunities created and the problems posed by their environment, and the formal organization constitutes the immediate environment of the groups within it.

When we speak of formal organizations in this book, we do not mean to imply that attention is confined to formally instituted patterns; quite the contrary. It is impossible to understand the nature of a formal organization without investigating the networks of informal relations and the unofficial norms as well as the formal hierarchy of authority and the official body of rules, since the formally instituted and the informally emerging patterns are inextricably intertwined. The distinction between the formal and the informal aspects of organizational life is only an analytical one and should not be reified; there is only one actual organization. Note also that one does not speak of the informal organization of a family or of a community. The term "informal organization" does not refer to all types of emergent patterns of social life but only to those that evolve within the framework of a formally established organization. Excluded from our purview are social institutions that have evolved without explicit design; included are the informally emerging as well as the formally instituted patterns within formally established organizations.

The decision of the members of a group to formalize their endeavors and relations by setting up a specific organization, say, a social and athletic club, is not fortuitous. If a group is small enough for all members to be in direct social contact, and if it has no objectives that require coordination of activities, there is little need for explicit procedures or a formal division of labor. But the larger the group and the more complex the task it seeks to accomplish, the greater are the pressures to become explicitly organized. Once a group of boys who merely used to hang around a drugstore decide to participate in the local baseball league, they must organize a team. And the complex coordination of millions of soldiers with thousands of specialized duties in a modern army requires extensive formalized procedures and a clear-cut authority structure.

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Excerpted from Formal Organizationsby Peter M. Blau W. Richard Scott Copyright © 2003 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University . Excerpted by permission.
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