Charles Perrow citations (71 citations, Page 2)

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, power, and the origins of corporate capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2002/2009. Book abstract.
1980s and later

“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.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 13

“Inspection of the questionnaires also indicated that because staff members in the more custodial institutions were more willing to use negative sanctions they probably were confronted with less disruptive behavior, since the inmates recognized the costs of acting as they felt.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 170-171

“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.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

“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.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "Three Types of Effectiveness Studies," 1977, p. 97

“Then the works of Max Weber, first translated from the German in the 1940s — he wrote around 1910, incredibly — began to find their way into social science thought. At first, with his celebration of the efficiency of bureaucracy, he was received with only reluctant respect, and even with hostility. All writers were against bureaucracy. But it turned out, surprisingly, that managers were not. When asked, they acknowledged that they preferred clear lines of communication, clear specifications of authority and responsibility, and clear knowledge of whom they were responsible to. They were as wont to say "there ought to be a rule about this," as to say "there are too many rules around here," as wont to say "next week we've got to get organized," as to say "there is too much red tape." Gradually, studies began to show that bureaucratic organizations could change faster than non-bureaucratic ones, and that morale could be higher where there was clear evidence of bureaucracy.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, "The short and glorious history of organizational theory", 1973, p. 6

“People do not exist just for organizations. They track all kinds of mud from the rest of their lives into the organization, and they have all kinds of interests that are independent of the organization.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 4

“Since organizations are established to do something, to perform work directed to some end, all organizations have goals – some implied, some explicit.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 133

“Unambiguous pursuit of official goals is not likely to be common.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 21

“While [bureaucratic] solutions have been frequently criticized by those within and without the organization, no alternative way has been found to cope with the problem of organizing large numbers of people to produce goods and services efficiently.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 90

“Particularism means that irrelevant criteria like e. g. only relatives of the boss have a chance at top positions, in contrast to universalistic criteria like e. g. competences is all that counts, are employed in choosing employees… The particularistic criteria are likely to be negatively related to performance.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 8-10

“What do individuals or groups of similarly hope to gain from participation in the affairs of the organization? Or, to use an awkward phrase we shall reiterate frequently, what are the uses to which they put the organisation?”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 16

“All complex organizations use people to pursue their tasks, but people-changing organizations work not only with or through people but also on them. People constitute the raison d'etre of these organizations, and, and, as our label suggests, the desired product is a new or altered person. People-changing organizations can be contrasted with organizations that produce, distribute, or service inanimate objects or symbols. The latter may have important consequences for their members' statuses, role-orientations, identities, and personalities, but these alterations are usually incidental, personal, or instrumental. In people-changing organizations the alterations re the primary end. Conceived in this way, the term "people-changing" encompasses a broad variety of organizations, ranging from the monastery (which cleanses the soul while teaching the outward signs of grace) to Menninger's (which restructures the personality), and even to the House of Venus”

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Charles Perrow

which reshapes buttocks and identity simultaneously
Source: 1960s, Organization for treatment, 1966, p. 3

“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.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "Hospitals: technology, structure and goals", 1965, p. 914

“Most social scientists consider the non-bureaucratic, or nonroutine organization to be good and the bureaucratic or routine organization to be bad (it impedes progress, is old- fashioned, is hard on its employees, etc.). But this judgment is debatable.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 83

“People in these fields no longer agree that such things as norms, values, and personality really exist or account for much; these concepts may only give a false sense of order to a world that both the academic and the person in the street desperately want to order. Sociology, too, is having some difficulty swallowing the simple, obvious proposition that attitudes predict behavior.”

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Charles Perrow

The proposition that morale predicts productivity is just one specification of this.
Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 115

“Operative goals designate the ends sought through the actual operating policies of the organization; they tell us what the organization actually is trying to do, regardless of what the official goals say are the aims.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1960s, "The analysis of goals in complex organizations", 1961, p. 855

“Organizational theorists, at least since the pioneering work of Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Joan Woodward, 1965 and others in what came to be called the contingency school, have recognized that centralization is appropriate for organizations with routine tasks, and decentralization for those with nonroutine tasks. For an early statement see Perrow 1967, and Lawrence and Lorch, 1967.”

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Charles Perrow livre Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 334

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

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Charles Perrow livre Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 23

“This article [entitled A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations], was one of three independent statements in 1967 of what came to be called "contingency theory." It held that the structure of an organization depends upon (is ‘contingent’ upon) the kind of task performed, rather than upon some universal principles that apply to all organizations. The notion was in the wind at the time.
I think we were all convinced we had a breakthrough, and in some respects we did — there was no one best way of organizing; bureaucracy was efficient for some tasks and inefficient for others; top managers tried to organize departments (research, production) in the same way when they should have different structures; organizational comparisons of goals, output, morale, growth, etc., should control for types of technologies; and so on. While my formulation grew out of fieldwork, my subsequent research offered only modest support for it. I learned that managers had other ends to maximize than efficient production and they sometimes sacrificed efficiency for political and personal ends.”

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Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow, in "This Week’s Citation Classic." in: CC, Nr. 14. April 6, 1981 (online at garfield.library.upenn.edu)
Comment:
The other two 1967 publications were Paul R. Lawrence & Jay W. Lorsch. Organization and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, and James D. Thompson. Organizations in action. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
1980s and later

“In a modern society, where large organizations have acquired unprecedented importance, social scientists have increasingly sought to understand the nature of organizational goals - what they are, what shapes or determines them, what their impact is upon the environment, and how they change.”

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Charles Perrow

Perrow (1968), "Organizational goals," in: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: The Macmillan Co. p. 305
1960s

“Nonroutine tasks:… There are few well-established techniques; there is little certainty about methods, or whether or not they will work. But it also means that there may be a variety of different task to perform, in the sense that raw materials are not standardized, or orders for customers ask for many different or custom-made products.”

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Charles Perrow

Source: 1970s, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, 1970, p. 75