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Lectures Organisation and Society
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Colleges Organization and Society15-11-2023
Introduction – Organization and society.
Organizations are in all aspects of our lifes. Every day we come across organizations. Like
health/education/work/leisure/consumption.
Persistence: traditions/ patterns/ events and practices that come repeatedly. Some of these
are good (for integration), but some are not beneficial or serving society.
Change: in the form of protest/ or the form of organizing.
Embeddedness: relations between members of society. People are connected to each other;
they form relations with each other.
Inequality: about who get access to resources. Like what are your earnings, who can get
access to better jobs.
Organizations are diverse. We have more formal and more informal organizations.
Organizations can be temporarily (for a specific goal) or long-term or for centuries.
Organizations can also be illegal (they operate illegal – like a criminal organization). They are
not all formal legally recognized. They are diverse.
Organization = purposeful collective of people. Members of the organization have a
common goal. That brings them together. This assumes that there is some form of
collaboration between them. There is relatively continuous existence (it is not instant like a
market transaction).
It has an internal structure (some form of formal structure, but there is also an
informal structure).
It has external boundaries. Boundaries mostly form around who is a member and who
is a non-member. They distinguish themselves from environment. Not all
organizations want their boundaries to be seen (like criminal organizations, the
boundaries are there, but not visible for outsiders).
Organizations are both sites and drivers of action.
Here they are context.
Here they are actors. There is
collective action.
Social mechanism approach: explaining outcomes.
The Coleman boat where are organizations in the Coleman boat: they can be both on the
individual and the macro level.
Social mechanism: A constellation of actors and activities that regularly bring about a
particular outcome.
,20-11-2023
Persistence
- Example of rowing clubs. While everything around the two rowing organizations
changes - (more students, the city of Utrecht changed etc.) the organizations stayed
the same next to each other.
- Persisting rituals despite controversy. The ritual for new members exists still
nowadays, even while they are controversy. These rituals persist.
Where do we observe persistence?
Organizational collectives.
Organizations.
Organization building blocks (job/ occupations remain very much the same)
Individuals (habits/ routines)
One explanation = The phenomenon of imprinting.
Imprinting means that there is an individual organization, that had a sensitive period (acquire
attributes/ establish themselves), in that period the environment is important (impacts
organizations) and this persist over time.
It leads to characteristics of the organization impacted by the environment persists
through time despite the fact that environments change.
Organizational elements of the RUG that may be imprints:
Toga’s/ start on time/ faculties.
Sensitive periods: it is temporally restricted. It is not endless. The period in which we are
more influenceable to environmental influences. More open to change.
Organization (at foundation/ at organizational transitions – merger/ changing
ownership/ new leadership).
Individual (role transitions/– more open to changes from environment – new job/ new
study).
Individual level: Role transitions.
Individual/professional socialization. We experience more uncertainty, that’s why we want to
reduce uncertainty by looking at the environment.
Cognitive unfreezing: cognitive models that… they hold can be challenged and
replaced with scripts and schema that are more congruent with the new environment.
(our mind is opening up and it can be replaced by new information when our
environment radically changes)
Vulnerable/ uncertain times amplify the potential for imprinting.
Limited learning in non-sensitive periods (due to habits/routines based on what
they learned. You establish to routines. The focus is only in the new period).
Source of imprints:
Economic and technological conditions. (how do I use technologies/ how do your
parents use technologies – we imprinted with the new technologies when we grew
up, our parents didn’t).
Institutional factors (like what are the common practices and standards – nowadays
organizations have to think about environmental sustainability, earlier this was less
the case).
Individuals (people can be a source of imprints – influential founders leave their mark
on the organization. Also, political leaders can leave a long-lasting mark, for instance
China under Mao). (First in an organization who serves a role leaves an imprint for
the next people that serve this role later. Also, mentors & peers because you learn
from them).
, Stamp of the environment.
Why certain elements from the environment are being adopted into the organization?
Organizations select elements from the environment to reduce uncertainty and to satisfy the
legitimacy of the organization leads to isomorphism (adopts elements from environment
– organizations look similar – they take on the same form).
Collectives that were found in a certain period, took on a certain form of employment
structure. Even later collectives wanted to look similar, so they took on the same form. There
are different periods of organizational collectives that were founded.
Why organizational imprints persist:
Institutionalization =
1) Process (institutionalization) and the outcomes of the process (institutionalized) in
which social activities become regularized and routinized as stable, social-structural
features how we get lectured is strongly institutionalized. If we start a new
university, we will use the same form of teaching that is institutionalized.
2) Social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-
activating social processes.
Self-activating = not much reinforcement, once established they keep continuing and
repeating the same patterns.
Parenting is strongly institutionalized (parents do not come up with it themselves, we learn
from norms and patterns/ideas).
Three main mechanisms of institutionalization:
1) Increasing returns (coercive) – organizations and individuals get rewarded when they
follow certain norms and rules. It coercive/ forces individuals and organizations to
follow certain institutionalized rules.
2) Increasing commitment (normative). Committed to recreate certain practices because
they are committed by their values and identification.
3) Increasing objectification (cognitive) – what is given to us as a social reality.
1) Increasing returns (economic returns what is to gain or lose by following the institutional
procedure):
1. High setup costs of new approaches (cheaper to take over what others are doing)
2. Learning and habituation (it becomes a habit – relearning takes energy
3. Coordination advantage (same idea/ practice has coordination advantage)
4. Adaptive expectation of newcomers (newcomers learn easier when things remain the
same)
Can’t go without the formal requirements. That applies to basically everything.
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