Classical
This theory looks at micro-level organizational functioning (manager-employee relationship). Its tenets include one best way to do every top, proper selection of workers, training workers, and strict division of labor.
What is Taylor's Theory of Scientific Management?
What is one key takeaway from the Hawthorne Studies?
What are the paradigm shift to human relations or the importance of informal social factors?
The concept that organizations must be as diverse and complex as their environment and problems.
What is requisite variety?
This position argues that reality is not an objective thing but is instead an intersubjective construction created through communication.
What is social constructionism?
Habermas compared the role of a critical theorist to this.
What is a psychoanalyst?
This theory is broken down into elements of management (what they should do) and principles of management (how elements should be enacted).
What is Fayol's Theory of Classical Management?
The difference between McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y?
What is Theory X influenced by most negative aspects of classical management and Theory Y influenced by human relations principles?
There are two critiques of a prescriptive approach to culture. Provide one of them.
What is naive to assume there is a single cultural formula to success? What is treating culture as a thing that an organization has instead of the complex processes that create/sustain org culture?
There are two common critiques of the CCO approach. Provide at least one of them.
What are downplaying materiality and downplaying issues of power and control?
A researcher studying workplace dress codes would be likely using this approach.
What is a feminist approach?
This theory is an "ideal type" theory. Aspects that are more unique to it include the importance of closed systems, written rules, and rational-legal authority.
What is Weber's Theory of Bureaucracy?
These are the two axes of Blake & Mouton's Managerial/Leadership Grid.
What is concern for production and concern for people?
The four things that a descriptive approach to organizational culture highlight.
What is that organizational cultures are complicated, emergent, fragmented, and ambiguous?
The constitutive approach discusses this metaphor.
What is the container metaphor?
The three concepts in the theory of concertive control.
What are control, identification, and discipline?
The content, direction, mode/channel, and style of communication expected or preferred in the classical approach. (4 parts)
What is task, vertical, written, and formal?
The family metaphor highlights these three things about organizations/organizing in a human relations approach.
What are the emphasis of relationships, the assumption that employees thrive when needs are met and opportunities exist, and the relational distinction between organization members?
The three components of the system metaphor.
What are hierarchical ordering, interdependence, and permeability?
The four flows of communication.
What are membership negotiation, self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning?
The 5 key concepts for critical theorists.
What are power, ideology, hegemony, emancipation, and resistance?
The machine metaphor highlights these three things of a classical approach to organizations/organizing.
What are specialization, standardization, and predictability?
A key difference between the human relations and human resources approaches.
What is the concentration of employees' contributions to reaching organizational goals?
What the culture metaphor views organizations as.
What are sites of interlinked beliefs, values, behaviors, and artifacts?
The two important patterns of a CCO approach.
What is communication as central to any understanding of organizing and the reciprocal, recursive relationship between micro-level interactions and macro-level systems of meaning?
Summarize the common ground for feminist theorists into a sentence or two.
What is that organizations are communicatively constituted in gendered ways through which power is exerted typically in ways that privilege men/masculinity?