STRUCTURE: TECHNOLOGY AND STRUCTURE

Technology has become increasingly popular as an explanatory concept in organizational

analysis. Technology is seen by Woodward (1965) to affect several levels of management and

the span of control in the British industry. Perrow (1967) suggests how several hypotheses lining

this concept to different aspects of the organization’s structure and goals. There’s the need to

locate a general technological dimension that can be used not only in industry but also in people-

processing organizations as well. The difficulty in finding a general variable describing

technology stems from the fact that the concept subsumes many different ideas.

The routineness of work does not cover all aspects of the concept of technology. Other

dimensions can be defined and measured which it's difficult to apply across all organizations.

The degree of routineness is one dimension of technology that can be applied equally to people-

processing, industrial and other kinds of organizations and it can provide the bases for the

general proposition that can be tested in many organizational contexts.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND MEASUREMENT

Data from sixteen health and welfare agencies were collected in which ten of these agencies are

private while six were either public or branches of public agencies. Procedures for measuring

organizational variables are seen when organizations are composed of individuals working in

various jobs which are arranged in different structural configurations and work-flow.

Organizations were divided into levels and departments and then job occupants were selected

randomly within these categories. There is also the measurement of routineness were several

questions were used in constructing the measure of the routineness of work.

HYPOTHESES AND FINDINGS

The impact of technology on the social structure by noting that coordination can occur either via

planning, programmed interaction, or feedback which makes this basic assumption which is

derived from March and Simon (1958) provides a basis for interpreting the possible

consequences of the degree of routineness of work. If technology can be routinized, then

coordination can be and probably will be planned and programmed.

The findings are as follows: Organizations with routines work are more likely to be characterized

by the centralization of organizational power. organizations with routine work are more likely to

have greater formalization of organizational roles. There is no relationship between the degree of

routine work and organizational stratification. Organizations with routine work are likely to have

staff with less professional training.

SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

When the relationship between the routineness of technology and organizational goals is

examined. In organizations with a relative routineness technology, the staff members are likely

to report more emphasis on the efficiency and quantity of clients than on the quality of service

and staff morale. While it is relatively easy to accept hypotheses about the relationship between

routineness and properties of an organizational structure, it is less easy to accept the idea that the

degree of routineness is the only variable involved. The size of the organization, its autonomy

and its level of financing are probably variables of equal importance nor should the routineness

of technology be considered as the only relevant technological dimension.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE: BEHAVIOURAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Changes in structure can be divided into measurement and control functions where measurement

function is concerned with performance and its measurement while the control function relates

the process of planning and evaluating. Performance evaluation and reward systems are central

components of the control system but one major offset between both functions is even though

they are interlinked, they are inadequately distinguished from each other. When it comes to

structural change, an influential force in the development of management is the need to measure

and value work in progress; also, frequent intangibility of the services provided and the

subsequent difficulties in assigning objective measures of quantity and quality to these which can

be closely linked to perceived difficulties of standardizing services. In terms of structural change,

the presence of the customer in the service process can be expected to contribute to the

complexity of operations which is due to the absence of inventories and unpredictable peaks and

troughs in demand and the relative unpredictability of customer behavior.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE

In terms of behavioral change compared to the interest in structural changes, the unpredictability

of human behavior as it impacts the behavior of an organization has received less attention. The

slime that professional employees, in particular, tend to resist thinking in terms of efficiency and

are driven by motivational sources that are incompatible with economic resource utilization and

therefore display limited willingness to use or respond to functional information (McDonald and

Stromberger, 1969). Various informal mechanisms can reasonably be expected to be powerful

determinants of employee behavior in an organization.

Output ought to be measured since there was change, so, as long as the measurability of outputs

is high and the knowledge of the transformation or change process is a good one, the formal

measures of either output and/or aspects of human behavior may form appropriate bases for

control.

DEDUCTIONS

There is a close link to structural control aspects which shows themselves informal management

systems which appears to be a step towards the integrated approach considering the framework

stresses the need to shift the research from a narrow focus on management to a wider

conceptualization of management control where the former is seen as but one component of a

larger control package.

Another framework is the basis for relating control to a broader contextual setting which may

contribute to more comparative research efforts

REFERENCE

Modell, S., 1996. Management accounting and control of services: structural and behavioral

perspectives. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 7(2), pp.57-80.

Hage, J. and Aiken, M., 1969. Routine technology, social structure, and organization

goals. Administrative science quarterly, pp.366-376.