Complexity of Modern Organizations

According to Richard Scott, organizations are conceived as social structures created by individuals to support the collaborative pursuit of a specified goal. What Scott means is that organizations are groups whose members coordinate the behavior to accomplish shared goals or create a product. We live in an organizational society, and many of the problems we confront are organizational in nature. We cannot change society or understand much of it without knowing something about the organizations and how they work. The social reality of organizational life is complex, and we need conceptual frameworks to help us make sense of it. For example, what should we pay attention to about an organization? What matters and what does not matter? Where to begin if we want to study and change an organization?

There are so many problems that arise in an organization. The first is that organizations confront the problem of defining their objectives, mission, and vision statement. It is not always clear what they are about and trying to accomplish. Organizations also struggle to get people to perform services or tasks. They worry about the coordination of these people trying to accomplish a task and even coordinating different tasks. There are also concerns about drawing necessary resources from the environment. Organizations require input like money or revenue. They need materials and even knowledge. Then they must worry about outputs like dispensing ideas, products, and funds to the environment. There's also a concern with selecting, training and replacing members as people move through these organizations. People also get old, they die, they decide their interests in other things, and constantly selecting and retraining and replacing members is a key part of an organization. Organizations even worry about relations outside the firm. Ties to the neighbors, ties to competitors, and ties with the surrounding environment are also important. For example, Metro Cash and Carry can't just up and move into any neighborhood. It must consider the environment and the dependencies within that context before moving in and getting the necessary resources from the environment.

The organizations also change their path silently and unintentionally without realizing that they have drifted away from their original mission. This happens when organizations have not decided about the strategic priority and sometimes rush to earn a profit on the stock market model. When detected, it is important for the organizations either to return to their original path or change their goals.

So, organizations are complex, and it is always helpful to have a conceptual space or set of elements for further understanding their complexity. Richard Scott has identified a set of organizational elements. In the figure below, the organization is represented as having a boundary and being placed in a wider environment. Every organization has social actors or participants/people, a social structure by which they interrelate, a goal or mission, and a set of technologies or tasks performed to render inputs into outputs.