Sociology of organisations
Watson Chapter 2: Analysing work and organisation:
scientific management, human relations and negotiated
orders
Six strands of thought that we need to be aware of if we are appreciate both the variation and
the communities in the sociological study of work.
THE MANAGERIAL-PSYCHOLOGISTIC STRAND
Scientific management and psychological humanism are, at first sight, diametrically opposed
in underlying sentiment and assumptions about human nature. But:
- Individualistic styles of thinking about work
- Concerned to prescribe to managers how they should relate to their employees and
should organise workers’ jobs
- Concentrate on questions of ‘human nature’
- Fail to recognise the range of possibilities for work organisation and orientation that
people may choose to adopt, depending on their priorities in life
To this extent, they can be regarded as psychologistic. The concern of each of the approaches
is to harness scientific method to discover and make legitimate what are, in effect, techniques
of manipulation rather than disinterested concerns with understanding.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
Taylorism encouraged a view of the industrial worker as an economic animal who could be
encouraged to act as a self-seeking hired hand and who would allow managers to do their job-
related thinking for them. If this could be achieved, the management would work out the most
efficient way of organising work, tying the monetary rewards of the work to the level of output
achieved by the individual. this would produce results which would benefit employer and
employee alike, removing the likelihood of conflict and the need for trade unions. Scientific
management involves:
, - The scientific analysis by management of all the tasks which need to be done in order
to make the workshop as efficient as possible
- The design of the jobs by managers to achieve the maximum technical division of
labour through advanced job fragmentation
- The separation of the planning of work form its execution
- The reduction of skill requirements and job-learning times to a minimum
- The minimising of materials-handling by operators and the separation of indirect or
preparatory tasks from direct or productive ones
- The use of such devices as time-study and monitoring systems to co-ordinate these
fragmented elements and the work of the deskilled workers
- The use of incentive payment systems both to stabilise and intensify worker effort
- The conduct of manager-worker relationships ate ‘arms-length’ – following a ‘minimum
interaction model’
Associated with the logic of capital accumulation.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANISM
Psychological humanists argue for achieving organisational efficiency not through the
exclusion of workers from task-related decision-making, but by encouraging their participation
in it with. Human beings are being seen as naturally disliking work and therefore avoiding it if
they can. People prefer to avoid responsibility and like to be given direction. The manager
therefore controls and coerces people towards the meeting of organisational objectives. the
effect of this is the employees passive acceptance of the situation may be encouraged,
leading to a lack of initiative and creativity. But McGregor states that people are not all like
this but would generally prefer to exercise self-control and self-discipline at work. He believed
this would occur if employees were allowed to contribute creatively to organisational
problems in a way which enabled them to meet their need for self-actualization.
The basic scheme of Maslow is the ‘hierarchy of needs’ model. This suggests that there are
five sets of genetic or instinctive needs which people possess and that as one satisfies most
of the needs at one level one moves up to seek satisfaction of the needs at the next level:
1. Physiological needs = food, drink, sex, sensory satisfaction
2. Safety needs = motivate people to avoid danger
3. Love needs = belong and affiliate with others (giving and receiving)
4. Esteem needs = prestige, status, appreciation and confidence, achievement, strength
5. Self-actualization = desire to realise one’s ultimate potential
Herzberg came up wit the ‘motivation-hygiene’ or two-factor theory of work motivation. He
differentiated between:
- Contextual (hygiene) factors = salary, status, security, working conditions. Can lead to
dissatisfaction if ‘wrong’, but which do not lead to satisfaction if ‘right’
- Content (motivation) factors = achievement, advancement, responsibility, growth.
These have to be present Iin addition to the contextual factors) before satisfactions can
be produced and people motivated to perform well
THE DURKHEIM-HUMAN-RELATIONS STRAND
,For Durkheim, the purpose of society is to maintain stability and cohesion through successful
regulation and integration of the pre-social self into the prevailing norms and values of a
society. A health individualism could exist as long as the society provided regulation, directing
principles or norms.
Durkheim was worried about a particular form of anomie, a form of social breakdown in which
the norms which would otherwise prevail in a given situation cease to operate. He was
worried about one in which the organic integration of society would be threatened by
unrestricted individual aspirations and hence a lack of any kind of social discipline, principle or
guiding norms.
Mayo put the industrial work-group and the employing enterprise, with the industrial
managers having responsibility for ensuring that group affiliations and social sentiments were
fostered in a creative way. Managerial skills and good communications were the antidotes to
the potential pathologies of an urban industrial civilisation.
Hawthorne effect = it was inferred that the close interest shown in the workers by the
investigators, the effective pattern of communication which developed and the emerging high
social cohesion within th group brought together the needs of the group for rewarding
interaction and cooperation with the output needs of the management.
Pareto:
1. The suggestion that workers’ behaviour can be attributed to their ‘sentiments’ rather
than to their reason
2. An emphasis on the notion of system, this conveniently according with the holistic
tendencies of Durkheim
Human relations industrial sociology has been widely criticised for such things as its
managerial bias, tis failure to recognise the rationality of employee behaviour and its denial of
underlying economic conflicts of interest. In making human individuals secondary to or
derivative of the social system in which they are located, Durkheimian approaches ten to pay
insufficient attention to the degree of interplay which goes on between individual initiative
and social constraint in human societies.
THE INTERACTIONIST-NEGOTIATED-ORDER STRAND
The interactionist perspective, with its focus on the individual, the small group and on
meanings, is almost a polar opposite of the Durkheim systems strand. But there are important
continuities. This can be seen in a common interest taken in occupations as central social
institutions and also in recognition of the importance of the division of labour in society.
The basic positions of this strand is that the individual and society are inseparable units, their
relationship is mutually interdependent. Human beings construct their realities in a process of
interaction with other human beings. Individuals derive their very identity from their
interaction with others. All interaction and communication is dependent on the use of symbols
(words, gestures, clothes, skin).
The concept of negotiated order shows how ‘order’ in the hospital can be an outcome of a
continual process of negotiation and adjustment. Organisational rules and hierarchies play a
part in the patterning of life in organisation, but the overall organisational order is one that
emerges out of the processed whereby different groups make use of rules, procedures and
information in the day-to-day negotiations that occur between them about what is to happen
in any given situation at any particular time.
, Ethnomethodology denies any objective reality to social phenomena. It suggests that there
are no such things as societies, social structures or organisations. Instead, there are
conceptions of this type within the heads of ordinary members of society which are made use
of by these ‘members’ in carrying out their everyday purposes. At the hearth of
ethnomethodology is the study of the ‘’common sense’’ methods that members use to solve
problems, make decisions, make sense of their situations and undertake fact finding in their
everyday lives.
Watson Chapter 3: Analysing work and organisation:
institutionalism, labour process and discourse analysis
WEBER-SOCIAL ACTION-INSTITUTIONAL STRAND
Weber-social action-institutional strand takes into account both the meaningful activity of the
individual and the larger-scale questions of historical change and economic and political
conflicts.
Weber defined sociology as the study of social action. The discipline should examine the ways
in which people, through the attribution and inference of subjective meanings, would be
influenced by each other and thereby oriented in their actions. Legitimate order: a patterning
in social life which individual actors believe to exist and to which they may conform. Weber’s
sociology is informed by a set of philosophical assumptions about the world which include a
view of reality as infinitely diverse and as involving the existence of fundamental differences
of value, interest and perspective. Social life is thus characterised by perpetual conflict,
struggle and the exercise of power. Humans are seen as rational beings pursuing ends, but
there is no direct relationship between their efforts and the resulting social order. There is a
paradox of consequences in social life.
Paradox of consequences = the tendency for the means chosen to achieve ends in social
life to undermine or defeat those ends
Weber talks of an ‘elective affinity’ between ideas and interests: people tend to choose,
develop or adopt ideas which fit with their material interests – these interests in turn being
influenced by available ideas. He is showing that the cultural or subjective aspects of social
life have to be seen as equal partners in any analytical scheme. With rationalisation, social life
is ‘demystified’ or disenchanted, rational pursuit of profit motivates work behaviour and
efforts are increasingly co-ordinated through bureaucratic means. Weber was in fact pointing
merely to the potential superiority of bureaucracy as an administrative instrument (its formal
rationality) whilst being fully aware that it could manifest features which rendered it
materially irrational, even going so far as to threaten individual freedom in a society with an
attachment to such a goal or value.
The meaning attached by individuals to their work which predisposes them both to think and
act in particular ways with regard to that work. To understand how people approach their work
we need to look at their whole life situation, their notion of who they take themselves to be
(‘the job . . . wasn’t me’) and at the social, economic and value contexts through which they
move in their lives
Organisations take the shape they do, not because of their efficiency or proven effectiveness,
but because people draw from the culture around them value-based notions of how things
should be organised.‘
Watson Chapter 2: Analysing work and organisation:
scientific management, human relations and negotiated
orders
Six strands of thought that we need to be aware of if we are appreciate both the variation and
the communities in the sociological study of work.
THE MANAGERIAL-PSYCHOLOGISTIC STRAND
Scientific management and psychological humanism are, at first sight, diametrically opposed
in underlying sentiment and assumptions about human nature. But:
- Individualistic styles of thinking about work
- Concerned to prescribe to managers how they should relate to their employees and
should organise workers’ jobs
- Concentrate on questions of ‘human nature’
- Fail to recognise the range of possibilities for work organisation and orientation that
people may choose to adopt, depending on their priorities in life
To this extent, they can be regarded as psychologistic. The concern of each of the approaches
is to harness scientific method to discover and make legitimate what are, in effect, techniques
of manipulation rather than disinterested concerns with understanding.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
Taylorism encouraged a view of the industrial worker as an economic animal who could be
encouraged to act as a self-seeking hired hand and who would allow managers to do their job-
related thinking for them. If this could be achieved, the management would work out the most
efficient way of organising work, tying the monetary rewards of the work to the level of output
achieved by the individual. this would produce results which would benefit employer and
employee alike, removing the likelihood of conflict and the need for trade unions. Scientific
management involves:
, - The scientific analysis by management of all the tasks which need to be done in order
to make the workshop as efficient as possible
- The design of the jobs by managers to achieve the maximum technical division of
labour through advanced job fragmentation
- The separation of the planning of work form its execution
- The reduction of skill requirements and job-learning times to a minimum
- The minimising of materials-handling by operators and the separation of indirect or
preparatory tasks from direct or productive ones
- The use of such devices as time-study and monitoring systems to co-ordinate these
fragmented elements and the work of the deskilled workers
- The use of incentive payment systems both to stabilise and intensify worker effort
- The conduct of manager-worker relationships ate ‘arms-length’ – following a ‘minimum
interaction model’
Associated with the logic of capital accumulation.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANISM
Psychological humanists argue for achieving organisational efficiency not through the
exclusion of workers from task-related decision-making, but by encouraging their participation
in it with. Human beings are being seen as naturally disliking work and therefore avoiding it if
they can. People prefer to avoid responsibility and like to be given direction. The manager
therefore controls and coerces people towards the meeting of organisational objectives. the
effect of this is the employees passive acceptance of the situation may be encouraged,
leading to a lack of initiative and creativity. But McGregor states that people are not all like
this but would generally prefer to exercise self-control and self-discipline at work. He believed
this would occur if employees were allowed to contribute creatively to organisational
problems in a way which enabled them to meet their need for self-actualization.
The basic scheme of Maslow is the ‘hierarchy of needs’ model. This suggests that there are
five sets of genetic or instinctive needs which people possess and that as one satisfies most
of the needs at one level one moves up to seek satisfaction of the needs at the next level:
1. Physiological needs = food, drink, sex, sensory satisfaction
2. Safety needs = motivate people to avoid danger
3. Love needs = belong and affiliate with others (giving and receiving)
4. Esteem needs = prestige, status, appreciation and confidence, achievement, strength
5. Self-actualization = desire to realise one’s ultimate potential
Herzberg came up wit the ‘motivation-hygiene’ or two-factor theory of work motivation. He
differentiated between:
- Contextual (hygiene) factors = salary, status, security, working conditions. Can lead to
dissatisfaction if ‘wrong’, but which do not lead to satisfaction if ‘right’
- Content (motivation) factors = achievement, advancement, responsibility, growth.
These have to be present Iin addition to the contextual factors) before satisfactions can
be produced and people motivated to perform well
THE DURKHEIM-HUMAN-RELATIONS STRAND
,For Durkheim, the purpose of society is to maintain stability and cohesion through successful
regulation and integration of the pre-social self into the prevailing norms and values of a
society. A health individualism could exist as long as the society provided regulation, directing
principles or norms.
Durkheim was worried about a particular form of anomie, a form of social breakdown in which
the norms which would otherwise prevail in a given situation cease to operate. He was
worried about one in which the organic integration of society would be threatened by
unrestricted individual aspirations and hence a lack of any kind of social discipline, principle or
guiding norms.
Mayo put the industrial work-group and the employing enterprise, with the industrial
managers having responsibility for ensuring that group affiliations and social sentiments were
fostered in a creative way. Managerial skills and good communications were the antidotes to
the potential pathologies of an urban industrial civilisation.
Hawthorne effect = it was inferred that the close interest shown in the workers by the
investigators, the effective pattern of communication which developed and the emerging high
social cohesion within th group brought together the needs of the group for rewarding
interaction and cooperation with the output needs of the management.
Pareto:
1. The suggestion that workers’ behaviour can be attributed to their ‘sentiments’ rather
than to their reason
2. An emphasis on the notion of system, this conveniently according with the holistic
tendencies of Durkheim
Human relations industrial sociology has been widely criticised for such things as its
managerial bias, tis failure to recognise the rationality of employee behaviour and its denial of
underlying economic conflicts of interest. In making human individuals secondary to or
derivative of the social system in which they are located, Durkheimian approaches ten to pay
insufficient attention to the degree of interplay which goes on between individual initiative
and social constraint in human societies.
THE INTERACTIONIST-NEGOTIATED-ORDER STRAND
The interactionist perspective, with its focus on the individual, the small group and on
meanings, is almost a polar opposite of the Durkheim systems strand. But there are important
continuities. This can be seen in a common interest taken in occupations as central social
institutions and also in recognition of the importance of the division of labour in society.
The basic positions of this strand is that the individual and society are inseparable units, their
relationship is mutually interdependent. Human beings construct their realities in a process of
interaction with other human beings. Individuals derive their very identity from their
interaction with others. All interaction and communication is dependent on the use of symbols
(words, gestures, clothes, skin).
The concept of negotiated order shows how ‘order’ in the hospital can be an outcome of a
continual process of negotiation and adjustment. Organisational rules and hierarchies play a
part in the patterning of life in organisation, but the overall organisational order is one that
emerges out of the processed whereby different groups make use of rules, procedures and
information in the day-to-day negotiations that occur between them about what is to happen
in any given situation at any particular time.
, Ethnomethodology denies any objective reality to social phenomena. It suggests that there
are no such things as societies, social structures or organisations. Instead, there are
conceptions of this type within the heads of ordinary members of society which are made use
of by these ‘members’ in carrying out their everyday purposes. At the hearth of
ethnomethodology is the study of the ‘’common sense’’ methods that members use to solve
problems, make decisions, make sense of their situations and undertake fact finding in their
everyday lives.
Watson Chapter 3: Analysing work and organisation:
institutionalism, labour process and discourse analysis
WEBER-SOCIAL ACTION-INSTITUTIONAL STRAND
Weber-social action-institutional strand takes into account both the meaningful activity of the
individual and the larger-scale questions of historical change and economic and political
conflicts.
Weber defined sociology as the study of social action. The discipline should examine the ways
in which people, through the attribution and inference of subjective meanings, would be
influenced by each other and thereby oriented in their actions. Legitimate order: a patterning
in social life which individual actors believe to exist and to which they may conform. Weber’s
sociology is informed by a set of philosophical assumptions about the world which include a
view of reality as infinitely diverse and as involving the existence of fundamental differences
of value, interest and perspective. Social life is thus characterised by perpetual conflict,
struggle and the exercise of power. Humans are seen as rational beings pursuing ends, but
there is no direct relationship between their efforts and the resulting social order. There is a
paradox of consequences in social life.
Paradox of consequences = the tendency for the means chosen to achieve ends in social
life to undermine or defeat those ends
Weber talks of an ‘elective affinity’ between ideas and interests: people tend to choose,
develop or adopt ideas which fit with their material interests – these interests in turn being
influenced by available ideas. He is showing that the cultural or subjective aspects of social
life have to be seen as equal partners in any analytical scheme. With rationalisation, social life
is ‘demystified’ or disenchanted, rational pursuit of profit motivates work behaviour and
efforts are increasingly co-ordinated through bureaucratic means. Weber was in fact pointing
merely to the potential superiority of bureaucracy as an administrative instrument (its formal
rationality) whilst being fully aware that it could manifest features which rendered it
materially irrational, even going so far as to threaten individual freedom in a society with an
attachment to such a goal or value.
The meaning attached by individuals to their work which predisposes them both to think and
act in particular ways with regard to that work. To understand how people approach their work
we need to look at their whole life situation, their notion of who they take themselves to be
(‘the job . . . wasn’t me’) and at the social, economic and value contexts through which they
move in their lives
Organisations take the shape they do, not because of their efficiency or proven effectiveness,
but because people draw from the culture around them value-based notions of how things
should be organised.‘
