Knowledge that Transforms

The primary purpose of this study was to compare and contrast an organization's official culture and its subcultures. The proposition that soft bureaucracies project a rigid exterior appearance, symbolizing what key stakeholders expect, while masking a loosely-coupled set of interior practices, guided this analysis of a police organization. The official culture (crime-fighting command bureaucracy) was examined as an arbitrary set of symbols and meaning structures arranged according to top management preferences. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the organization's subcultures were profiled. It was demonstrated that top management was unable to impose organization-wide conformance with the official culture. There was close conformance to the official culture in only one of five distinct clusters of officers (“crime-fighting commandoes,” 21 percent of the sample). Officers in the other clusters (“crime-fighting street professionals,” “peace-keeping moral entrepreneurs,” “ass-covering legalists,” and “anti-military social workers”) substantially modified or rejected top management's dictates. They represented resistance subcultures, similar in their opposition to official culture, but unique in form. It was concluded that other organizations, not known for their monolithic image and solidarity, also encompass subcultures.

The interpretive approach to organizational research has been gaining increasing attention as a legitimate alternative to the more traditional positivist approach. The organizational literature has already provided thorough descriptions of each approach, and clarified the differences between them. Indeed, it often appears that the two approaches are opposed, with the differences irreconcilable. This paper will go beyond the differences and establish an integrated framework for the two approaches. An actual, published organizational study will be used as an exemplar for the integrated framework (Nardulli 1978, 1979).

To regard voluntary organizations as unique manifestations of organizational behavior requires an accurate account of the nature of such work systems. This paper appraises existing definitions of the voluntary agency in the context of organization science and presents evidence for replacing the nonvoluntary/voluntary dichotomy with entrepreneurial, professional, and bureaucratic organizations, on the one hand, and two voluntary-organizational subtypes on the other: “voluntary groups,” in which volunteers operate as a socio-technical unit, and “voluntary agencies,” in which volunteers cooperate with paid personnel. Moreover, when paid staff is involved, some voluntary work contexts were found to take on characteristics of all three other organizational types to form a mixed pattern. Further tests of the relative distinctiveness of both subtypes vis-a-vis other organizational types and theories is proposed. The research yields certain guidelines for the design of true group-based organizational systems, thus extending knowledge in that area. It also provides an example of how research extending beyond the narrow confines of bureaucracy to the many other organizational forms known to exist might be conducted; such research is sorely needed to inform the practice of organizational design as a whole.

This paper presents an intraorganizational ecological perspective on strategy making, and examines how internal selection may combine with external selection to explain organizational change and survival. The perspective serves to illuminate data from a field study of the evolution of Intel Corporation's corporate strategy. The data, in turn, are used to refine and deepen the conceptual framework. Relationships between induced and autonomous strategic processes and four modes of organizational adaptation are discussed. Apparent paradoxes associated with structural inertia and strategic reorientation arguments are elucidated and several new propositions derived. The paper proposes that consistently successful organizations are characterized by top managements who spend efforts on building the induced and autonomous strategic processes, as well as concerning themselves with the content of strategy; that such organizations simultaneously exercise induced and autonomous processes; and that successful reorientations in organizations are likely to have been preceded by internal experimentation and selection processes effected through the autonomous process.

This paper contends that the analysis of organizational design and the analysis of intraorganizational power are inextricably intertwined for all major models of organization. While the coalitional model of organization is often viewed as the only model that explicitly links these topics, we argue that power does in fact play a central role in the traditional, rational model of organization, and that it is only the conception of intraorganizational power that differs between the two models. After contrasting the design prescriptions and power implications of the coalitional and rational models, the paper reconciles these two models by developing an “adaptively rational” model of organization that takes into account both the political dynamics and the task requirements of organizations.

Organizations learn from experience. Sometimes, however, history is not generous with experience. We explore how organizations convert infrequent events into interpretations of history, and how they balance the need to achieve agreement on interpretations with the need to interpret history correctly. We ask what methods are used, what problems are involved, and what improvements might be made. Although the methods we observe are not guaranteed to lead to consistent agreement on interpretations, valid knowledge, improved organizational performance, or organizational survival, they provide possible insights into the possibilities for and problems of learning from fragments of history.

The degree of risk taking by lower level (division) managers is expected to vary depending upon the extent and type of diversification. Limited diversification, when coupled with M-form adoption and decentralization, induces managerial risk taking. Notwithstanding, the control system elaborations (e.g., strategic business unit [SBU] structures) to facilitate information processing as firms increase diversification, extensively diversified firms reach limits such that control loss reduces managerial risk taking. Ultimately, this control loss may result in poor relative performance thereby triggering a threat of takeover. The threat of takeover creates incentives for restructuring and more focused diversification. Firms that reduce their diversified scope through restructuring may induce managerial risk taking. Thus, diversified firms experience periods that induce and other periods that reduce division manager risk taking depending on diversification and associated control system attributes.

This paper illustrates how a learning-curve model can be generalized to investigate potential explanations of organizational learning. The paper examines the hypothesis that knowledge acquired through by learning by doing is embodied in an organization's technology by analyzing the amount of transfer that occurs across shifts within a plant. If knowledge becomes completely embodied in technology, transfer across shifts should be complete since both shifts use the same technology. Methods that can be used for studying intra-plant transfer of knowledge are presented. The methods are illustrated by analyzing data from a plant that began production with one shift and then added a second shift several months into the production program. Three aspects of transfer are analyzed: (1) carry forward of knowledge when the plant makes the transition from one to two shifts, (2) transfer across shifts after both shifts are operating, and (3) transfer across time. Results indicate that substantial, but less than complete, transfer of knowledge occurred when the second shift was introduced. Once both shifts were operating, partial transfer across them occurred. Implications of the results for a theory of organizational learning and practical applications are discussed.