helpful to identify several ‘strands’ of thinking. This mapping, it must be stressed,
is produced, once again, in the spirit of Philosophical Pragmatist thinking. It has
been devised in order to help the traveler proceed on their journey, as opposed to
producing a totally ‘correct’ or accurate representation of the nature of the ground
over which that journey is to occur.
- 1 The Functionalist/Systems and Contingency Strand
In this strand of thinking, organizations are viewed as systems: as social entities
which function as self-regulating bodies which exchange energy and matter with
their environment in order to survive. They ingest ‘inputs’ which they convert
into ‘outputs.’ The approach has some of its roots deep in historical social
thought and, at a level nearer the surface of the soil in which it grew, in the
‘structural functional’ style of sociological thinking which set out to explain
various social institutions and aspects of social institutions in terms of the
functions that they fulWll for the overall social ‘whole’ (or ‘system’) of which
they are a part (Abrahamson 2001 ; Colomy 1990 ). Thus, to take a very simple
example, one would explain the high rewards paid to senior managers, relative to
the wages paid to ordinary workers, by arguing that the organizational system in
which these people are employed, in order to continue in existence,needsthe
expertise that can only be obtained if those relatively higher incomes are pro-
vided. Relative diVerences of class or organizational power are not considered and
neither are the deliberate eVorts of managers to give themselves a relative
material advantage in the organizations which they run. In spite of the danger
of removing human initiative or agency from explanations of what happens in
organizations, systems analyses have the advantage of making us constantly aware
that organizations are more than the sums of the parts from which they are
made: they are patterns of relations which need constantly to be adapted to allow
the organization to continue in existence. It also stresses that what happens in
one part of an organization (in one ‘subsystem’) tends to have implications for
what happens in other parts or ‘subsystems.’
Systems approaches to organizations have roots other than those in social
thought and social science. They have also been inXuenced by biological thinking
and by ‘general systems thinking,’ a cross-disciplinary scientiWc way of thinking
about a whole range of diVerent phenomena (Boulding 1956 ; Von BertalanVy 1972 ;
Emery 1969 ). But systems thinking in the organizational sphere has also been
signiWcantly inXuenced by the contributions made by engineers (above p. 110 ).
The outcome of this is that a powerful metaphor in management thought, which
has been of immense attractiveness to managers, has been that of the organization
as a system, as a big social machine which takes in raw material, knowledge, and
human eVort and outputs various goods and services, with this whole apparatus
organization theory and hrm 113