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born 1925 United States
Charles B. Perrow (born February 9, 1925) is an American Emeritus Professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University.
United States Academics Business theorists Sociologists Also known as: Charles B. Perrow
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It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.
Without this form of social technology, the industrialized countries of the West could not have reached the heights of extravagance, wealth and pollution that they currently enjoy.
The vast proportion of the activity in organizations goes on without personal directives and supervision – and even without written rules – and sometimes in permitted violation of the rules.
Organization theory...has been altogether too accommodating to organizations and their power.
Chapter Five deals with the messiest problem of all— but the one to which all analytical roads should lead : the nature of organizational goals and the strategies used to achieve them.
As an organizational sociologist, I was interested in the system characteristics of large accidents, but the discipline also made me aware of the organizational genesis of male-made disasters.
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?
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.
As with all theories, we can learn something from agency theory and transaction-costs economics, since they emphasize something others hide. But as with all theories, they also distort; in fact, I will argue that their distortions outweigh the value of what they highlight.
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.
Product of complex interactions within and between the organization’s social structure, leadership groups and environment. ... They are never static but subject to continual pressure and changes over time.
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.
Executives were closely observed at work at their desks, at staff meetings, while talking with inmates or moving about the grounds and so on, and again in the feedback sessions when we gave them findings.
It [the human relations school ] lacks empirical support and conceptual clarity, and it fails to grapple with the realities of authoritarian control in organizations and the true status of the subordinate
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.
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.
Routine tasks... are well-established techniques which are sure to work, and these are applied to essentially similar raw materials, That is, there is little uncertainty about methods and little variety or change in the tasks that must be performed.
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.
The structural viewpoint considers the roles people play, rather than the nature of the personalities in these roles. It deals with the structures in which roles are performed— the relationship of groups to each other, such as sales and production, and the degree of centralization or decentralization.
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.
Perrow (1968)
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