Type IV: Open Natural Systems Models


Recently the open rational models that have dominated since the 60's are being supplanted by open natural theories. These new, abundant theories challenge the idea that organizations behave rationally.


Social Psychological Level


Weick's Social Organizing
Weick is both a natural and open theorist as he explores how individuals "organize". Weick notes that the cognitive processes individuals use in organizations involve trial and error, chance, superstitious learning, and retrospective sense-making. He doubts that evolution and adaption necessarily results in improved organizational forms.

Negotiated Order
Also known as the symbolic interaction method, researchers in this perspective have focused on how meaning is created and maintained in organizations (Scott p. 108). They commonly use ethnography to explore how structures and rules are created and maintained in organizations.

Organizational Learning
James March and other researchers in this area see organizations as having loose, shifting coalitions that continually shift organizational goals and preclude an assumption of stable rationality. Organizations learn from experience and often suffer from poor information processing, unresponsive aspiration levels, and inappropriate risk evaluation.

Structural Level


Socio-Technical Systems
Emerging from action-based research out of the Tavistock group in England, they argue that both the social and technical systems must be jointly optimized when adapting the organization to it's environment. They advocate worker participation and semi-autonomous work groups.

Strategic Contingency
An adaptation of contingency theory, researchers in this area contend that decisions are "constrained but not determined" by technical and environmental conditions. Managers have some choice, and those coalitions who can deal with the most uncertainty have the most power.

Ecological Level


Population Ecology
An adaptation of natural selection theory to organizations, population ecologists contend that that organizational forms with the best fit to environmental characteristics will be selected and proliferate.

Resource Dependency
In this perspective, organizations have choice over their own fate. Managers try to acquire resources from their environment without creating difficult dependencies that reduce their power.

Marxist Theory
"Marxists argue that organizational structures are not rational systems for performing work in the most efficient manner; rather, they are power systems designed to maximize control and profits. Work is divided and subdivided not to improve efficiency but to "deskill" workers, to displace discretion from workers to managers, and to create artificial divisions among the work force" (Braverman, 1974).

Institutional Theory
Institutional theorists contend that many of the environmental forces on organizations are not based on efficiency or effectiveness but on social and cultural pressures to conform to a given structural form.

Postmodernism
Postmodernists feel that all knowledge is subjective and contextualized by history and culture. Everything is relative. They reject the idea that rationality is continually advancing through the use of science. They tend to use more literary and cultural analyses than more traditional scientific methodologies.