Peter M. Blau is Professor in the Department of Sociology, the University of Chicago. During the academic year 1966-67, he held the Pitt Professorship at Cambridge University, England. He has taught at Cornell and Wayne State Universities. In 1948-49 he was a pre-doctoral Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. He then held a five-year Ford Foundation Master Fellowship in the field of business administration. Under a National Science Foundation Grant he has been director of the Comparative Organization Research Program. Professor Blau served as Editor of the American Journal of Sociology for 10 years. A recent book co-authored with Otis Dudley Duncan, is an empirical study of social mobility and occupational achievement in the United States, The American Occupational Structure. Professor Blau has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and a Senior PostDoctoral Fellow of the National Science Foundation. 5 THE STUDY OF Peter M. Blau If a number of men have a common aim but each simply proceeds to work toward it as he sees fit in disregard of the rest, they are likely to work at cross purposes. Sooner or later, one of them will probably seek to improve the situation by suggesting, "Let's get organized!" The effective accomplishment of a common task requires that men organize themselves by establishing procedures for working together. Sometimes they do so informally by coming to implicit agreements concerning how to proceed. But often, particularly when large numbers are involved, men establish explicit procedures for coordinating their activities in the interest of achieving specified objectives, which means that they create a formal organization. They establish a club or a firm, they organize a union or a political party, or they set up a police force or a hospital, and they formulate procedures that govern the relations among the members of the organization and the duties each is expected to perform. Once firmly established, an organization tends to assume an identity of its own which makes it independent of the people who have founded it or of those who constitute its membership. Thus organizations can persist for several generations, not without change but without losing their fundamental identity as distinct units, even though all the members at some time come to differ from the original ones. The United States Army today is the same organization as the United States Army in the World War of 1914-1918, even though few if any of its 1918 personnel have remained in it and its structure has undergone basic alterations. The collective efforts of men may become formally organized either because all of them have some common interests or because a subgroup has furnished inducements to the rest to work in behalf of its interest. Factory workers organize themselves into unions to bargain collectively with management, and management has organized their tasks for the purpose of producing goods marketable for a profit. Unions and factories exemplify formal organizations, as do government bureaus and political parties, armies and hospitals. THE CONCEPT OF FORMAL ORGANIZATION Although a wide variety of organizations exists, when we speak of an organization it is generally quite clear what we mean and what we do not mean by this term. We may refer to the American Medical Association as an organization, or to a college fraternity; to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, or to a union; to General Motors, or to a church; to the Daughters of the American Revolution, or to an army. But we would not call a family an organization, nor would we so designate a friendship clique, or a community, or an economic market, or the political institutions of a society. What is the specific and differentiating criterion implicit in our intuitive distinction of organizations from other kinds of social groupings or institutions? It has something to do with how human conduct becomes socially organized, but not-as one might at first suspect-whether or not social controls order and organize the conduct of individuals, since such social controls operate in both types of circumstances. There are two basic principles that govern social life, and organizations manifest one of these. Social structures may emerge as the aggregate result of the diverse actions of individuals, each pursuing his own ends, or they may reflect the joint endeavors of individuals pursuing commonly accepted ends. Thus, as individuals and groups in a community compete, enter into exchange relations, and use their resources to exercise power over others, an economic system and a class structure develop which reveal organized patterns of social conduct although nobody has explicitly organized the endeavors of individuals. The government of a society or a football team, on the other hand, are social structures deliberately established to achieve certain objectives, and the regularities observable in them reflect the deliberate design. The distinction is essentially the one William Graham Sumner makes between "crescive" and "enacted" institutions. Social systems produced by formally enacted procedures rather than merely emergent forces are organizations. Whereas the distinction is an analytical one, since crescive and enacted forces typically interact in their effects on social systems, it finds expression in concrete entities-the many organizations that can be found in modern societies. Whenever groups of men associate with one another, social organization develops among them, but not every collectivity has a formal organization. The defining criterion of a formal organization-or an organization, for short-is the existence of procedures for mobilizing and coordinating the efforts of various, usually specialized, subgroups in the pursuit of joint objectives. If all relations among the members of organizations and all their activities were completely predetermined by formal procedures, however, organizations would evidently not pose meaningful problems for scientific inquiry, because everything about them could be ascertained by simply examining the official blueprints and procedure manuals. Actually, the social interaction and activities in organizations never correspond perfectly to official prescriptions, if only because not all prescriptions are compatible, and these departures from the formal blueprint raise problems for empirical study. Paradoxically, therefore, although the defining characteristic of an organization is that a collectivity is formally organized, what makes it of scientific interest is that the developing social structure inevitably does not completely coincide with the pre-established forms. Organizations generally have an administrative machinery, a specialized administrative staff responsible for maintaining the organization as a going concern and for coordinating the activ ities of its members. In a large factory, for example, there is not only an industrial work force directly engaged in production, but also an administration composed of executive, supervisory, clerical, and other staff personnel. The term "bureaucracy,” which connotes colloquially red tape and inefficiency, is used in sociology neutrally to refer to these administrative aspects of organizations. The common element in the colloquial and the scientific meaning of the term is that both are indicative of the amount of energy devoted to keeping the organization going rather than achieving its basic objectives. Not all soldiers are actually in combat; not all employees of manufacturing concerns are production workers; not all members of police departments are out "on the beat"; many members of every organization have the administrative task to maintain the organization. But wide variations among organizations exist in the degree of bureaucratization, as indicated by the amount of effort devoted to administrative problems, the proportion of administrative personnel, the hierarchical character of the organization, or the strict enforcement of administrative procedures and rigid compliance with them. WEBER'S THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY In his classical theory of bureaucracy, the German sociologist Max Weber outlined the distinctive characteristics of formal organizations that are bureaucratically organized. The most important of these characteristics are:1 1. Organizational tasks are distributed among the various positions as official duties. Implied is a clear-cut division of labor among positions which makes possible a high degree of specialization. Specialization in turn promotes expertness among the staff, both directly and by enabling the organization to hire employees on the basis of their technical qualifications. 2. The positions or offices are organized into a hierarchical authority structure. In the usual case this hierarchy takes on the shape of a pyramid wherein each official is responsible for his subordinates' decisions and actions as well as his own to the superior above him in the pyramid and wherein each official has authority over the officials under him. The scope of authority of supervisors over subordinates is clearly circumscribed. 3. A formally established system of rules and regulations gov |