Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • Identities, Boundaries and Soci - Charles Tilly 97

    Uploaded by

    Vivek Singh
    150 views1 page
    This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.

    Original Description:

    Identities, Boundaries and Soci - Charles Tilly 97

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Report this Document
    This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    150 views1 page

    Identities, Boundaries and Soci - Charles Tilly 97

    Uploaded by

    Vivek Singh
    This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 1

    It takes a lot of energy just to stand your ground—balancing male

    egos with your right to survive. I wanted a job, I wanted to be a good


    truck driver, I wanted to be able to pull my weight as a driver. So
    years have passed now and somehow I survived. The guys are
    beginning to see me as a real human, not just a broad with legs and
    boobs. And the dispatcher has passed to the point of seeing me as a
    driver, I think. (Schroedel 1985: 156–57)

    Marge Kirk, a woman in an overwhelmingly male job, had worked her


    way by means of incessant improvisation to a unique combination of
    scripts and local knowledge.
    Our five configurations—chains, hierarchies, triads, organizations, and
    categorical pairs—provide widely available scripts. They rely on common
    knowledge, for example, shared understandings of how superiors and
    inferiors signal their relations to each other. They also generate common
    knowledge as people use them, for example, by relying on third parties in
    triads to patch up disagreements within any particular pair. Together,
    familiar scripts and accumulated common knowledge lower transaction
    costs of whatever activities an organization carries on. They thereby raise
    relative costs of shifting to some other structure of social ties. Managers of
    organizations ordinarily adopt the five configurations in various
    combinations as devices for managing social relations within the
    diagram’s midsection, where some scripting and common knowledge
    combine.
    How the configurations work, indeed, depends importantly on where in
    the two-dimensional space they fall. When goldsmiths who have common
    knowledge of their craft work together for the first time, they may use
    familiar scripts to establish hierarchies of reward and deference, but they
    can start to produce golden articles without extensive ritual. New cadets in
    military academies, however, ordinarily lack familiarity with both
    organizational structure and local lore; their superiors make up for those
    deficiencies by intensive scripting and drumming in of common
    knowledge. Only later do superiors let military recruits improvise within
    the limits set by well-known scripts.
    Activating the emulation mechanism, managers of organizations often
    accomplish their work by importing configurations—particular
    hierarchies, chains, triads, and categorical pairs—with which new
    organizational members already have considerable experience and

    97

    You might also like