Knowledge that Transforms

The authors identify the key organizational and environmental characteristics that influence the effectiveness and efficiency of publicly funded service organizations. In a study of 40 community mental health centers (CMHCs), they used fulfillment of community needs as a measure of effectiveness and utilization of various services as a measure of efficiency. The results indicate that client educational status, state facility utilization, minority population, personnel expense, management type, and board composition affect need fulfillment. The study also illuminates the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness of publicly funded service organizations. The findings suggest that the allocation of resources to these organizations from local, state, and federal governments tends to he based on the extent of unmet needs for services. That is, the less the publicly funded service organization meets community needs, the more government funds are allocated to meet the needs. If the unmet needs that stimulate higher levels of funding actually reflect inefficiency, the inverse relationship between effectiveness and efficiency suggests that the government's resource allocation may not be based on performance, but may in fact be rewarding inefficiency. The findings suggest that legitimacy does not enhance efficiency and that legitimacy and efficiency may be entirely independent, which is consistent with institutional theory. The study results will be of practical use to community leaders, taxpayers, consumer advocates, regulatory agencies, and managers of community mental health organizations.

An organization's decision whether or not to train its workers affects the overall economy, even if the firm does not factor the economy into its decision. If all firms within an industry fail to train their workers, the whole economy suffers. Hence, training workers is a type of public good, a category that encompasses a broad range of social dilemmas. Employees face a similar dilemma in their choice of how much to contribute to the overall productivity of the organization. If employees receive a share of the profits regardless of their contribution, some may decide to free ride on the efforts of their fellow workers. If all employees decide to do so, the company will fail. The two dilemmas on the employee and organizational levels are closely interrelated. On one side, the benefits of training accrue only to the extent that employees contribute to the organization. Thus, a firm should take into account how it expects a training program to affect employee effort as well as employee turnover. On the other side, trained workers produce at higher rates, which in turn may affect how much they contribute and how often they migrate to other firms in comparison with untrained workers. The authors study the dynamics of training and turnover in firms facing both organizational- and employee-level dilemmas. First they establish a simple model that captures those conflicts and incorporates imperfect information and both worker and organizational expectations. Organizations can be both created and dissolved, and employees can move between firms, start new ones, or leave the industry for good. Next the authors summarize the different ways the dilemmas can unfold over time, collated from a number of computer experiments. For example, under one set of conditions, the double dilemma can be resolved for the industry as a whole and productivity then increases steadily over time. Alternatively, the organizational-level dilemma may remain unresolved and workers may contribute at fluctuating levels. In that case the overall productivity stays low. The authors find a positive correlation between high productivity, low turnover, and enterprise size, a relation that has also been observed in the empirical literature on training, stability, and turnover in organizations.

Since its definition in the early 1980s, organizational demography has become an influential research area. Scholars map the relationship between demographic variables and organizational outcomes, examining such questions as whether increasing work group diversity leads to greater turnover and whether decreasing tenure similarity within a top management team leads to more numerous strategic reorientations. Asking such questions requires only a demographic predictor and an outcome, but answering them often requires additional theoretical constructs. For example, the relationship between work group diversity and turnover might be explained by communication and conflict. As work group diversity increases, communication within the group may become more difficult, resulting in greater conflict and thus increasing turnover. Despite the important, sometimes critical, role of such additional theoretical concepts, researchers often leave them loosely specified and unmeasured, creating a “black box” filled with vague, untested theories. This article presents a critical analysis of this approach. The results show that simple demographic explanations may generate multiple, mutually exclusive, often implicit theories involving numerous additional concepts. An evaluation of these more complex theories against previous research shows that they receive only weak support. Hence, the black box approach to organizational demography presents serious theoretical problems. Examples are provided to illuminate these problems. Four directions are suggested for research in organizational demography: deepening current variance explanations, creating dynamic models, exploring factors that produce demographic distributions, and moving beyond the variance model.

The thesis I explore in this essay is that organizational members use humorous remarks to discursively construct and organize their cognitive and emotional experiences in and of their organizations. My assumptions are that: (1) organizations are socially constructed through discourse about them (especially managerial discourse), (2) humorous discourse provides a contradiction-centered construction of organizations that operates in the domains of both cognition and emotion, and (3) interpretation of the text of ironic remarks will suggest the processes by which contradictions and their cultural and emotional contexts are socially constructed through discourse. In this essay I use a form of analysis that I developed in relation to humor theory (Mulkay [Mulkay, M. 1988. On Humor. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK.]), theories of irony (Brown [Brown, R. H. 1977. A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.], Weick and Browning [Weick, K. E., L. D. Browning. 1986. Argument and narration in organizational communication. J. G. Hunt, J. D. Blair, eds. 1986 Yearly Review of Management of the Journal of Management 12 243–259) and Rorty's (Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.) concept of the ironic disposition to interpret spontaneous humorous exchanges observed during the regular meetings of a group of middle managers. My interpretations of ironically humorous remarks indicate that the managers in my study constructed at least some of their cognitive and emotional experiences in contradictory ways including: possible/impossible, great/horrible, comic/serious, and up-to-date/unprepared. The interpretations also suggest how, in constructing contradiction, the managers reflexively constructed themselves in relation to their organization. The analysis points to a paradoxical understanding of organizational stability and change and informs a contradiction-centered view of organizations.