Welcome to organizational analysis. In this lecture, we will identify some core analytic features of organizations.

These analytic features give us a language or terminology we can use to make sense of firms, their various forms and their prevailing problems. Organizations are complex so it helps to have a concept space, a set of things or elements to focus on in discussing them. This requires some abstraction from, from the details of our personal experiences in firms. For this we rely on the work of Richard Scott. Richard Scott is a faculty member here at Stanford who's been writing about organizations for the last three or four decades. He reviewed the history of organizations research and identified a finite set of organizational elements for us to consider and focus upon. You can see these elements in the diagram in the slide. In the diagram, an organization is represented as having a boundary and being placed in a wider environment. Every organization has certain elements. It has a set of social actors or participants, a social structure by which they interrelate, a goal or mission, and a set of technologies or tasks it performs to render inputs and desired outputs. Let's take each of these elements of an organization in turn in the slides that follow. First, we have an organization's participants. These are a firm's social actors, employees, and stakeholders. Participants are social actors that make contributions to and derive benefits from the organization. For schools these social actors are adults and children. And they typically assume roles like administrators, superintendents or principals. Teachers can be particular adult roles, students, staff or others. The staff can have roles like custodians, counselors, nurses, cafeteria workers and even administrative assistants. Even parents and politicians connected with this school in various ways are participants. Participants can also be organizational actors like firms in a field.

If you recall, we noted that organizations are often things listed in contracts and considered to be unitary actors in some dimensions of the social life. In the technology industry, firms often have relations with one another and they influence one another's affairs, so if we look at this particular field, the technology and information systems, we see variety of firms whose existence is dependent on others around them and the relationships they have. Second, we have an organization's social structure. This concerns features that regulate and establish the usual pattern of relationships between participants. So social, social structure concerns the persistent relations existing among participants within an organization. These can vary in form from some being vertical, others horizontal. And yet others, matrix forms of organization. Simply looking at these organizational charts shows you the variety of social structures that are feasible. These can also vary in degree of formality. Formal structures entail clearly prescribed and demarcated social positions, while informal social structures emerge in our unplanned relations that persist. In a school, the formal structure might reflect the prescibed rules we briefly mentioned above. Principals, assistant principals, department chair, teacher, students, counselors. So on. All of them have rules with relational obligations. The informal structure might be the actual advice relations and friendships that arise between participants. For example some teachers may be popular in a locus of authority even though they lack such formal positioning. Likewise for students. Some may hold undue authority and influence that alters the way a curricular is taught. You can see this difference in the slide next to me here.Where you so both the formal organizational chart and next to it kind of an informal network of association and advice. Social structures are more then recurring behavioral patterns.

They are also cultural systems that entail normative principles and cognitive beliefs. In fact, these cultural aspects of social structure often guide behavioral patterns. For example, adults in classrooms often follow norms and ideals concerning how a teacher or manager should interact with others. That is, we have a sense of better and worse role performances. And organizations tend to revol, reward performances that most coincide with those ideals. Social structure can even run deeper, and reflect cultural cognitive beliefs and understandings. For example, we find it hard to imagine schools without teachers and students. Can you imagine one that would be created without those kinds of roles? It, it's very difficult to convince an environment that that's a legitimate school. Anyhow, this belief is distinct from our sense of better or worse ways to perform those roles. The belief that every school has to have these roles is deeply ingrained in societies. The belief may invoke particular behavioral norms of teaching. Say, traditional or progressive norms of teaching, where you do, you know, lecture versus group work. And in turn these may partly shape the behavioral patterns witnessed in an organization like the school. So, for example, eventually those kind of percolate up into the, the actual structure we see. But it need not do so perfectly. Other social structures are at play in organizations, like those of gender roles, class differences, peer cultures, and so on, and they can cloud the clean appearance of prescribed forms of behavioral coordination that are obliged by our particular formal rules. What principles and beliefs give shape to these structures so people's behaviors adhere to them? Is it one authority, in control, in the formal chart, and is it one of task adaptation from the formal organization? What is it? Or is it the informal organization? These are the kind of questions that we ask when we think about social structure in organizations.

Third. Organizations have goals. And these goals are desired ends that participants attempt to achieve through the performance of task activities. So for example in schooling the goal is for, for K12 schooling kindergarten to twelfth grade, the technical and moral socialization of youth. If we focus on faculties and universities like Stanford we can see a historical change in what goals are present. So for example it went from early on being one about student training. To one later about research. To later one about resource acquisition and competition with other elite schools. To even to. Day, an additional layer of, of goals concerning social service, or community service in the environment in which we live. If we look at concrete missions, they vaguerly, vaguely relate to some of these ends. So companies often relate general goals such as Citibank or Citi Group, Levi's and Harley Davidson. If we look at the slide below we see the goal for Citi is, our, our goal for Citi Groupers to be most respected global financial services company. Like any other public company we're obligated to deliver profits and growth to our share holders and on it goes. Then we have Levi's, which says people love our clothes and trust our company. We will market the most appealing and widely worn casual clothing in the world. We will clothe the world. That's their initial mission statement. Somewhat of a public front and goal. And then we have Harley-Davidson. We fulfill dreams through the experience of motorcycling. By providing to motorcyclists, and to the general public, an expanding line of motorcycles and branded products and services in select market segments. So here you have the provision of a product as a goal and a particular kind of product. Organizations can vary and the extent to which their goal are focused are multifaceted. They can also very the extent to which their clear or ambiguous. So for example if we look at my own university and we look at the two schools I work with, or in the graduate school of

business and the graduate school of education. We see two very different kinds of mission statements, for the graduate school of business we see a concise statement, our mission is to create ideas that deepen and advance our understanding of management and with those ideas to develop innovative principled and insightful leaders who change the world. So it's kind of a . Clear mission statement about building managers. If we look to the school of education, it's a little more ambiguous or unclear and multi-faceted perhaps. Here we have aiming towards the ideal of enabling all people to achieve maximum benefit from their educational experiences, the Stanford University School of Education seeks to continue as a world leader in groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary inquiries that shape educational practices, their conceptual underpinnings, and the professions that serve the enterprise. So it's one of research as well as one of practice affecting practitioners in the world. The school also seeks to develop the knowledge, wisdom, and imagination of its students. So here, we have training of students as a, a third facet of this kind of goal. To enable them to take leadership positions, and efforts to improve the quality of education around the globe. And you notice, a lot of these statements talk about leaders, of going for an elite clientele. And training them for the world to have greater influence and a positive one. Fourth, an organization has a technology. Now, this can be a confusing concept. What it means, is that. A technology is a means by which an organization accomplishes work, or renders inputs and outputs. By this, the common word we would use is tasks. And tasks are often called technology, because machines and factory lines accomplish many tasks in today's organizations. What is processed in technologies varies from material inputs of manufacturing equivalent, equipment, to people being processed like in schools, or people being educated or people being coordinated, become more knowledgeable active citizens.

So schools, for example, try to, take inputs students and make them into output of, of having new skills and new sets of knowledge. The last organizational element concerns the environment. And the environment is the physical, technological, cultural, and social context, in which an organizations embedded. So let's take again at school. What is the environment a school confronts? Schools are often dependent on state and city governments for resources and funds, at least in the United States. They rely on trained workers and teachers from local universities. They depend on the neighborhood. They are situated in for clients and for student populations and so forth. So embedded in an environment are quite a few organizations and they're dependent on them for a variety of, of concerns. Environments can vary culturally in the sense that Eurodisney initially did not work. Because an American version of Disneyland could not just be plopped down in Europe without some changes.