Spencer’s Reviews > Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay > Status Update

It is through organizations that classes are constituted and reproduced, stratification systems created and stabilized (and changed in some cases), political processes tamed and guided, and culture itself shaped and molded.

In short, we are all agency theorists far more than we think!...the theory sounds heartless, simplistic, and even pointless, as it assumes that organized social life is nothing more than a series of contracts between people...But if we reflect on our daily justifications for our actions, we can see that we use agency theory daily to appropriate the gains, and overlook the losses, that attend our efforts.

Some of the most bitter disputes about organizational analysis turn upon basic preconceptions, especially those concerning human nature.

Garbage can theory draws fully on bounded rationality, using incomplete information, lack of knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships, and shifting goals and priorities, but it goes far beyond bounded rationality by conceptualizing dynamic group processes and emphasizing the need to rationalize, to construct something stable out of fluidity that is intolerable for organizations that see themselves as rational.

The history of research in this area is one of progressive disenchantment with the above theses and progressive awareness of the complexities of human behavior and human situations. As a result of 40 years of intensive research, we have a large body of information on what does not clearly and simply affect productivity and a growing list of qualifiers and conditions that have to be taken into account.

Any manager in any organization picks up all the rumors he can...official lines of commination, strung up and down the official hierarchy, are designed less to inform than to record, justify, and protect action...much communication outside the official lines such as gossip, is only occasionally important...to design a communications system to handle all the informal bits of information formally would create a monster

Bureaucracy is not the breeder of incompetence, as we often would like to believe. Instead, bureaucratic organization allows leaders to achieve goals, some of which are unannounced and costly for the rest of us and are only attributed to incompetence.