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Philip Selznick Quotes
1919–2010 United States
Philip Selznick (January 8, 1919 – June 12, 2010) was an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of California, Berkeley. A noted author in organizational theory, sociology of law and public administration.
United States Business theorists Sociologists Also known as: Selznick, Philip
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The most important thing about organizations is that, though they are tools, each nevertheless has a life of its own.
The institutional leader, then, is primarily an expert in the promotion and protection of values.
It has been well said that the effective leader must know the meaning and master the techniques of the educator.
The term “leadership” connotes critical experience rather than routine practice.
Leadership, pure and simple, is the assumption of responsibility for the pursuit of excellence in group life.
The art of the creative leader is the art of institution building, the reworking of human and technological materials to fashion an organism that embodies new and enduring values.
Cooptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy- determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence.
[Formal structures of formal organizations] never succeed in conquering the non-rational dimensions of organizational behavior.
Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.
The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism.
The action of the officials tends to have an increasingly internal relevance , which may result in the deflection of the organization from its original path, which, however, usually remains as the formally professed aim of the organization.
An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the “informal structure,” which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.
Institutionalization is a process. It is something that happens to an organization over time, reflecting the organization’s own distinctive history, the people who have been in it, the groups it embodies and the vested interests they have created, and the way it has adapted to its environment.
There seems to be little doubt that the factor of sheer size is a very important element in concrete bureaucratic structures. However, because of the patterns exhibited in the behavior of agents in small organized groups and because of the implications for greater generality, the formulation used here does not make the factor of size crucial for the existence of bureaucratic behavior patterns.
[Even if established procedures exist for replacing leaders,] they are relatively harmless to the entrenched leaders (because functionless) so long as the ranks fear the consequences of using them
p. 52; As cited in: Howard E. Aldrich (2008)
The formal administrative design can never adequately or fully reflect the concrete organization to which it refers, for the obvious reason that no abstract plan or pattern can—or may, if it is to be useful—exhaustively describe an empirical totality. At the same time, that which is not included in the abstract design (as reflected, for example, in a a staff and-line organization chart) is vitally relevant to the maintenance and development of the formal system itself.
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