Clay Shirky

Bolman and Deal offer four frames with which to break down organizations: their structure, their human resources, their political environment and their symbolic meaning. They offer a metaphor to capture the essence of each frame (translated for orchestra here):

(1) When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized. An example of this principle is when MGM a filed a lawsuit against Napster a decentralized organization, that caused the later to file for bankruptcy, but this incident did not stop people downloading music for free. A more decentralized Kazaa emerges and millions of free music were copied and downloaded (p.21).

Open systems perspective also suggests that organization's efficiency is equally important to it's success. An organization is efficient when it produces more outputs with less then normally required inputs, and when it's internal subsystems have good coordination among them. But this is difficult in reality. Because there are some negative elements in subsystems such as miscommunication and hostilities, which undermine efficiency of organization. These elements cannot be eliminated as subsystems of an organization are also open systems and organization gets affected by them also. (McShane & Steen, 2012, p.6)

While reading the essay, I picked up on a few organizational strategies that the author used, those being:

The Interactionist perspective looks at how institutions work together. They pay attention to smaller groups and how they influence individual’s behaviour and how they shape society rather thanfocusing on how much power the other groups have.

In addition, this essay will investigate the organizational strategies he uses to develop his idea. Ultimately, the purpose in identifying these parts of his argument is to determine whether his claims, evidence, and organizational strategies are successful in reaching his target audience.

Billy has some free-riders as co-workers. The scenario suggests that Billy is putting forth the effort in making decisions regarding the innovations in the company and putting in extra time while his colleagues are playing tennis. Billy, being in charge of technical development, feels as though his colleague’s lack of effort will delay any projects being worked on. A free-rider enjoys the benefits and efforts of others while not sharing in the costs of the effort. In Billy’s case, his fellow scientists will enjoy any credit or compensation received, from projects that come as a result of Billy’ hard work and long hours. From this example, it can be determined how damaging free-riding can be if not addressed or without having a good organization architecture and culture in place.

I agree with the author, If we were to be mandated to do voluntary work by the government, it would be "weakened". This would seem like a job minus the pay; helping others should not feel like a job, but should be more of a good deed. Volenteering can aslo help one to discover strenghtand weakenesses.

Daft, R. L. (2013). Introduction to Organizations. In S. Person (Ed.), Organizational Theory & Design (11 ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.

John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, are attributed to the concept of “Resource Mobilization Theory” by linking formal organization to that of firms.

Upon my reflection of the readings of Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Public Goals in Turbulent times, Chapter’s 1 through 7, I discovered how collaboration in Public Administration is an important tool when dealing on all levels of government together with the public and private sectors. Donahue and Zeckhauser discuss how information and resources is very important in collaborating with public and private partnerships. “Bring the knowledgeable party into the tent. That is the generic argument for collaborations motivated by information. When government lacks information essential to the accomplishment of a public mission and private actors possess

‘...collaboration is inherently more time-consuming – and hence resource-consuming and costly – than non-collaboration activities.’ (Huxham, 1996)

Cons: some team members may get used to the problems in the team and the contradictions among the members and no team leaders may have a negative effect on the team.

An example of the importance of systems thinking in a learning organization can be seen in the automobile manufacturer Fiat Auto Company. Fiat's Direzione Technica took a systems approach to understanding the consequences of its structure on new product development. As a result, it changed the structure to establish mechanisms for simultaneous engineering. To reduce the new products' time to market, functions now work in parallel rather than sequentially. [Extracted from Understanding Organizations as Learning Systems by Edwin C. Nevis, Anthony J. DiBella and Janet M. Gould, Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), www.solonline.org]

P1 Explain different types and purposes of organizations; public, private and voluntary sectors and legal structures. [AC 1]