Organizations in Action Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory

Thompson, J. D. (1967). Organizations in Action Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory. McGraw-Hill.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Textbook

Year

1967

DOI

10.4324/9781315125930/organizations-action-james-thompson

DOI registrant

Taylor & Francis

Link

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315125930/organizations-action-james-thompson

Cited from

economics_finance, organizational_management, physics

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Coordination
  • Coordination, as Thompson (1967) framed it in his foundational analysis of organizational interdependence, is the active alignment of independently controlled actors or processes so their actions combine into a coherent collective outcome, despite distributed decision-making and incomplete shared information.

    This sourceFoundational analysis of organizational interdependence (pooled, sequential, reciprocal) and the matching coordination mechanisms (standardization, plan, mutual adjustment); supports the framing of coordination as aligning interdependent actors.

• Division of Labor
  • Thompson (1967) classifies the residual coupling that partitioning leaves behind into pooled, sequential, and reciprocal task interdependence, each requiring progressively more intensive coordination.
• Task Interdependence
  • Task Interdependence is the workflow-coupling principle that the completion, quality, or timing of one task depends on inputs, outputs, resources, information, or decisions from other tasks, such that system performance depends not only on individual task performance but on the couplings between them
• Time
  • Labor is commodified as time sold for wages (hourly pay, salaries), a transformation Thompson (1967) documents as the historical shift from task-orientation to time-discipline under industrial capitalism.

Mechanisms

• Coordination Meeting Cadence
  • This is coordination by mutual adjustment in the classic sense — the mode reserved for exactly the reciprocal interdependence that standardization and plan cannot absorb.

    This sourceMatches reciprocal interdependence with coordination by mutual adjustment when coordination by standardization or plan is inadequate.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.

• https://books.google.com/books?id=2LgoiGFtDgIC ×1
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/Organizations_in_Action/_e1HAAAAMAAJ ×1

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