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"Formal Organizations"
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Socially-just radical alternatives for education and youth work practice : re-imagining ways of working with young people
\"Challenging dominant neoliberal discourses about ways of working with 'disconnected' young people, this book sets out ideas for generating radically different ways of thinking about such practices. Drawing on contemporary and historical material, the book argues that alternative approaches to formal and informal education are necessary to challenge repressive practices, and to help build a more equal, socially-just society. The book achieves this by re-imagining - with the aid of utopian studies - how formal and informal ways of working with young people might be made more empowering. Each chapter contributes to addressing the heterogeneity of experience of diverse life-worlds - in contrast to the homogenous one-size fits all approach to education and youth work that has become the dominant mode in neoliberal societies. Whilst many young people do make successful transitions to adulthood, a substantial minority are failed by an increasingly marketized social system - particularly education where young people are expected to achieve specified outcomes in a structure that does not speak to them, and leaves them wondering on the irrelevance of academic qualifications that seem to be out of their reach\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A network perspective on organizational architecture: performance effects of the interplay of formal and informal organization
We take a network perspective to organizational architecture, conceptualizing it as multiple networks of both formal and informal interactions and argue that their interplay is key to better understanding individual organizational member performance. We develop and test the concept of network consistency as the overlap between the informal network of advice and information with formal structures and processes, expressed as networks. We theorize that consistency between formal and informal networks exerts differing effects on performance. We test our theory in a financial services firm, using secondary data to create formal networks and annual performance evaluations for our dependent variable, along with primary survey data from organizational members to obtain the informal advice and information network. Results support our network approach to organizational architecture.
Journal Article
Renewal Through Reorganization: The Value of Inconsistencies Between Formal and Informal Organization
We develop a theoretical perspective on how inconsistencies between formal and informal organization arising from reorganization can help create ambidextrous organizations. We argue that under some conditions, the informal organization can compensate for the formal organization by motivating a distinct but valuable form of employee behavior that the formal organization does not emphasize, and vice versa—an effect we label compensatory fit. We illustrate the concept of compensatory fit by drawing on qualitative data from a reorganization at Cisco Systems. We also derive formal boundary conditions for compensatory fit using a simple game theoretic representation. We show that compensatory fit can only work when there is a powerful informal organization already in existence, and when the gains from ambidexterity are substantial. Further, depending on the strength of the informal organization, breakdown in the conditions necessary for compensatory fit may lead to performance declines and further reorganizations.
Journal Article
Status: Insights from Organizational Sociology
Status has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contributions of this field in terms of the determinants of status, the effects of status, and the mechanisms by which these effects are produced. We next appraise the way in which a network approach has contributed to our formal understanding of status positions and status hierarchies. We then highlight recent studies that demonstrate the value of studying the structures of status hierarchies themselves rather than focusing solely on the actors within them. After suggesting potential directions for future research, we conclude by calling for renewed efforts to translate concepts and theories across levels of analysis and substantive commitment in order to build more general theories of status processes.
Journal Article
The Social Bases of Philanthropy
Philanthropy-private giving for public purposes by individuals, corporations, and foundations-is a widespread activity. Scholarship on philanthropy is long-standing and can be traced to competing theorizations of gift-giving, wherein the gift has been framed as a case of altruism, self-interest, or reciprocity. Much of the resulting scholarship, in the disciplines of anthropology, economics, evolutionary biology, and psychology, has retained a focus on emphasizing actors' motivations for the scope and scale of philanthropy. Although sociologists have entered into the study of philanthropy more recently, they nonetheless have made important contributions to its understanding by drawing attention to the social bases of philanthropy. Sociologists have done so through the study of the micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors that explain variation in philanthropy; the specification of the institutional and legal arrangements that permit philanthropy; and the delineation of the social contexts that shape the direction and consequences of philanthropy.
Journal Article
Outsourcing Social Transformation: Development NGOs as Organizations
The literature on development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) envisions an alternative form of social organization, one that is more altruistic, more cooperative, and less hierarchical than governments and for-profit organizations. We engage with the literature on quite different terms: NGOs and their donors are organizations, and much of what is distinctive about them as organizations derives from the special uncertainties they face due to the environments in which they operate, the goals they pursue, and the social and material technologies they employ. We conclude that there are unexplored issues in the literature on development NGOs that sociologists, with their toolkit of theories and practices, are uniquely qualified to address.
Journal Article
Documents and Bureaucracy
This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.
Journal Article
Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness
A recurring theme in sociological research is the tradeoff between fitting in and standing out. Prior work examining this tension tends to take either a structural or a cultural perspective. We fuse these two traditions to develop a theory of how structural and cultural embeddedness jointly relate to individual attainment within organizations. Given that organizational culture is hard to observe, we develop a novel approach to assessing individuals' cultural fit with their colleagues based on the language expressed in internal e-mail communications. Drawing on a unique dataset that includes a corpus of 10.24 million e-mail messages exchanged over five years among 601 employees in a high-technology firm, we find that network constraint impedes, whereas cultural fit promotes, individual attainment. More importantly, we find evidence of a tradeoff between the two forms of embeddedness: cultural fit benefits individuals with low network constraint (i.e., brokers), whereas network constraint promotes attainment for people with low cultural fit.
Journal Article
Sociology and School Choice: What We Know After Two Decades of Charter Schools
Charter schools have been on the educational reform landscape for over twenty years. In the last ten years, a number of rigorous studies have examined the effects of these schools on student achievement and educational attainment. Findings reveal mixed results where student achievement is concerned (i.e., some positive, some negative, some neutral) and positive results in terms of educational attainment (i.e., high school graduation and college attendance). The article places this research within a framework that draws on both market and institutional theories, and concludes that additional research on the social organization of charter schools and traditional public schools is needed to better understand the conditions under which school choice is or is not effective.
Journal Article
The Worldwide Expansion of \Organization\
We offer an institutional explanation for the contemporary expansion of formal organization—in numbers, internal complexity, social domains, and national contexts. Much expansion lies in areas far beyond the traditional foci on technical production or political power, such as protecting the environment, promoting marginalized groups, or behaving with transparency. We argue that expansion is supported by widespread cultural rationalization in a stateless and liberal global society, characterized by scientism, rights and empowerment discourses, and an explosion of education. These cultural changes are transmitted through legal, accounting, and professionalization principles, driving the creation of new organizations and the elaboration of existing ones. The resulting organizations are constructed to be proper social actors as much as functionally effective entities. They are painted as autonomous and integrated but depend heavily on external definitions to sustain this depiction. So expansion creates organizations that are, whatever their actual effectiveness, structurally nonrational. We advance institutional theories of social organization in three main ways. First, we give an account of the expansive rise of \"organization\" rooted in rapid worldwide cultural rationalization. Second, we explain the construction of contemporary organizations as purposive actors, rather than passive bureaucracies. Third, we show how the expanded actorhood of the contemporary organization, and the associated interpnetration with the environment, dialectically generate structures far removed from instrumental rationality.
Journal Article