Реферат: Social organization
Another important classification with the focus on the character of interactions and relations existing in the organization identifies formal and informal organizations. Formal organizations are large secondary groups that are legally registered and rationally designed to achieve specific objectives. Informal organizations are secondary groups which for their minority or any other reason are not legally registered. They comprise groups of people who are cohered by personal interests in culture, sports, recreation etc., headed by a leader and not involved in activities designed to get material profits.
Formal organizations are so dominant that they are created to supervise and coordinate other organizations. They fulfill a variety of personal and social needs and vary in size. As they are designed for efficiency they have a carefully designed structure based on formal division of labour represented in the system of statuses, or jobs. Each job has a number of specific functions so that all tasks are distributed among members of the organization. Due to their similarity, job functions are grouped into a hierarchical structure on the principle of “superior and supervised” or a ladder of dependences of the lower ones (subordinates) to the upper ones (authorities).
Formal organizations regulate their activities by various means such as programs, patterns of official behaviour, principles and norms of reward etc. They have boards of directors and the management. Formal organizations are rational by nature as they are designed to achieve specific objectives and impersonal as their members are designed to enter into exceptionally official relations.
However, formal organizations tend to turn to bureaucracy. M. Weber considered the formation of bureaucracy, or the management as the major aspect of rationalization. Bureaucracy refers to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules is socially organized. Examples of everyday bureaucracies include governments, armed forces, corporations, hospitals, courts, ministries, or schools.
The German sociologist believed that bureaucracy in its ideal type should be governed by the following 7 principles:
1. Formal division of labour determined by regularized procedures: each enterprise or company has a full description of duties performed by its director, personnel manager, line managers or empoyees.
2. Hierarchy of authority: every official’s responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal. In any company, the vertical hierarchy includes top management, middle management and first-line managers executing control over workers.
3. The public office (bureau) as the basis of bureaucracy because it is the place where all written documents (electronic papers in modern companies) about the organization’s activities are collected.
4. The formal procedure of the officials’ training. The requirements to training a secretary are relatively simple while the programs of training top or middle managers are rather long and complex.
5. Permanent staff as employees who are working for the organization on a continous basis (for as long period of time as possible) and devoted themselves to it, i. e. work for this very organization is their main occupation.
6. Established rules and regulations: they may regulate the beginning and end of work, dinner and coffee breaks, leaves etc. In some organizations, for instance, at university such rules are described in detail: the beginning and end of the academic year, timetable of each shift, each pair, winter and summer sessions, holidays etc.
7. The member’s commitment to the organization as his strive to share and demonstrate the organizational rules and procedures. It needn’t be commitment or loyalty to the top manager or any other member of the organization.
Governing the formal organization by these principles makes its members’ behaviour predictable and helps the management to coordinate their activities. In turn, predictability and coordination are the main factors enabling to increase the organization’s efficiency and labour productivity. M. Weber considered high economic efficiency as the main advantage of bureaucracy. He described the ideal type of bureaucracy in positive terms, emphaizing continious character of the managerial process, undivided authority, subordination, expertise, exactness, quickness, official secrecy (know-how) and minimum conflicts.
At the same time some sociologists such as T. Parsons, A. Gouldner etc. identified a number of disadvantages of bureaucracy. For instance, division of labour may lead to trained incapacity; hierarchy of authority – to authoritarianism, communication disruption, and oligarchy. Another unintended consequence is a contradiction between a bureaucratic organization of management and creative activities of its members, capability to introduce innovations. Written rules and regulations may be inefficient in unusual or creative cases, when employees are demanded to work to the rule (the famous red tape), because knowledge and creativity cannot be transferred under order.
Management in the organization
Social organizations are also characterized by a number of objective and subjective processes in place. The first ones are cyclic processes of rise and fall, synergy etc., the second ones are those related to making various managerial decisions.
Management as a process can be executed only in the organization because any organization – from industrial enterprises, small businesses and supermarkets to coffee shops, schools and hospitals – are in need of being managed. Management focuses on the entire organization from both short - and long-term perspectives, so it is a process of forming a strategic vision, setting objectives, crafting a strategy and then implementing and executing the strategy. If management goes beyond the organization’s internal operations to include the branch and general environment, this is management of the organization.
The sociological approach focuses on management in the organization which it is identified as comprising three components. The first one is purpose-driven managing impact, the second one is self-organization. They both make up the third component – organizational regulation. When coordinated, the given components suggest integration based on making use of possibilities and limits of each and taking away potential contradictions. For instance, any official would like to transform a greater volume of decisions (orders, tasks) from impacts for one occasion to those of long-term perspective.
Any impact is impossible without applying methods of social governance that fall into those applied to a separate individual, group and social organization.
An individual’s behaviour can be regulated by direct order, stimulation (through needs and stimuli), system of values (bringing up, education) and social milieu (changing work conditions, a status etc).
A group as part of an enterprise can be governed by such methods as a purposeful formation of its structure (in number, location of jobs, qualifications, demographic qualities etc) and formation of unity (perfecting the leadership styles, arranging competition, applying psychological factors etc).
The level of social organization, for instance of an enterprise, requires such methods as coordination of formal and informal structures (taking away contradictions between planned and existing relations and norms), democratization of management (through increasing the role of public organizations, employees’ wide involvement in decision making, election of some middle and top managers etc) and social planning (qualification upgrading, perfection of the entity’s social structure, bettering of the social security system etc).
The uppermost product of management is managerial decisions. A managerial decision is a formally registered project of some change in the organization. Managerial decisions fall into:
strictly fixed ones when the authorities do not influence on the process of their making because their content is predetermined by the organizational terms such as law, instructions, directions of a higher establishment etc. Strictly fixed decisions are subdivided into:
· standardized, routine ones such as paying regular wages or allowances, sacking an employee after his taking a notice in etc.;
· derived, secondary ones such as those to implement decisions made before;
· “initiative” decisions are not strictly fixed, they suggest individual contribution of the decision-maker. They are subdivided into:
a) situational ones which mainly have episodic or local character (rewards, sanctions, irregular appointments etc);
b) reorganizing ones aimed at changing some element of the organization (redistribution of resources, developing new assignments, etc).