mon and March took the position that decision makers, while “intendedly rational,” face such great uncertainty that their actions cannot be understood by standard models of rational choice (i.e., decision theory). The Carnegie approach defined the central problem of organizations as managing the uncertainties inherent in complex work. For example, the “administrative man” (such as the bureaucratic official depicted by Weber) goes about solving problems by relying on a highly routinized search for satisfactory (but not necessarily optimal) actions. The work of Simon and March set the agenda for subsequent research on organizational learning and, more specifically, on the relationship between learning and the adaptability of organizations.
The second theoretical approach, known as institutionalism, focused on the organization as a whole. The American sociologist and legal scholar Philip Selznick, like Michels, emphasized the nonrational aspects of organizations. Using the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as an example, he argued that one of the most important features of organizations is the tendency for structures and processes to become “infused with value beyond the technical requirements at hand.” (TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization .) That is to say, an organization’s structures and processes tend to take on new meanings that are unrelated to the reasons they were adopted in the first place. This is the sense in which organizations become institutionalized and structures resist change.
Selznick also believed, as did institutionalist sociologists such as the American Talcott Parsons, that all organizations have a crucial need to gain support from key constituencies in the larger social system. The task of constituency building and networking is the basic job responsibility of top managers. Selznick documented a classic example of such efforts in his study of overtures by officials of the TVA to the leaders of local environmental groups. Because they had invited environmentalists to take part in the utility’s decision-making process, TVA managers put themselves in a better position to handle public criticism of the TVA’s mission.
Contingency theory, an approach that grew out of the Carnegie tradition, gained in popularity during the 1960s and ’70s. Contingency theorists disputed the assumption that a single form of organization is best in all circumstances. Instead, they claimed that the most appropriate form is the one that is best suited to the kinds of action the organization undertakes. For instance, Weber’s model of bureaucracy is an appropriate design for an organization that processes a high volume of routine transactions—a common characteristic of large government organizations, for example.
Organizations differ greatly in their modes of production. In Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice (1965), the English management scholar Joan Woodward argued that an organization’s methods are determined by the class of “core technologies” that characterize its work: small batch (where the work must be adapted to the peculiarities of the current batch—e.g., emergency medical care and residential construction), large batch (such as automobile manufacturing), or continuous processing (as in petroleum refining). Working within Woodward’s definitional framework, American sociologist James D. Thompson showed that, because the characteristic forms of task uncertainty vary by type, so also does optimal organizational design. Representing the high point in the development of contingency theory, Thompson’s thesis, published in Organizations in Action (1967), holds that good organizational designs are those that buffer core technologies from disturbances, such as interruptions in scheduling or inventory shortages.
Two subsequent schools of research took issue with the claim of contingency theorists that organizational designs are shaped by internal constraints. The school known as neoinstitutionalism revived the institutionalist view that the key organizational problem is that of gaining 