SOCIOL 2I03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Feudalism
13 Jan 2017
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Lecture 1 – Intro to Study of Organizations (Jan 6)
Understanding Organizations
• The social significance of organizations:
o Virtually everything we go as members of a society
o And a great deal of what we do as ind’s both occurs either within orgztns or thru orgztns – it’s hard to
do things in our everyday contemporary life and not be touched by orgztns in one way or another,
orgztns have a huge social significance to everyone
• The Sociology of Organizations:
o b/c they touch so much aspects of our lives the sociology of orgztns has become a major subfield in
sociology
o what we’re trying to do in the so do orgztns we are trying to understand the organizational
FOUNDATION of society
o some sociologists refer to the existence of an orgztnal society to indicate how organizational systems
have become to our everyday human activity
• What are organizations?
o Organizations: groups of people who participate in a division of labour that is coordinated by
communication and leadership to achieve common a goal/goals
o There’s a great deal of variation among orgztns b/c of this, sociologists created diff ways of looking at
them
o Let’s consider a break-down of it:
▪ Social groups that make up orgztns may come together deliberately or may come together
spontaneously
▪ The division of labour maybe simple divoflab or a complex divoflab
▪ The communication and leadership may be formal or informal
▪ Relation to common goal/goals: there may be one specific goal or several related goals w/in
an orgztn – there’s considerable amount of orgztns even when considering this def
• Note: b/c of this variation related to these 4 things, sociologists have conceptualized
diff orgztns
• Two Major Types of Organization
o We can make distinction b/w spontaneous orgztns and formal orgztns and spontaneous orgztns
o We’re not as concerned w. spontaneous orgztns, but we focus our analysis on formal orgztns
1. Spontaneous Orgztns
a. The break-down resembles the def of this
b. In any S.O it follows that the group of people will come together spontaneously
c. The divoflab is usually SIMPLE
d. Considering the communication + leadership → informal & based on a very rudimentary
and basic hierarchy
e. In terms of goals → only 1 single goal
i. Examples:
1. Bucket brigades
a. emerges when there’s a fire, they create a divoflab to get
water down the line to get rid of the fire
2. Search parties
a. when a child goes missing, people come together to look for
that child and there will be a SIMPLE divoflab
b. Communication & leadership – informal b/c someone will
suddenly be in charge & based on rudimentary hierarchy, no
one’s voting for a leader
c. A single goal – to find lost child
2. Formal Orgztns
a. People are going to come together deliberately either from the outset or overtime
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b. Divoflab usually COMPLEX
c. Communication & leadership → formal as there is a well-developed hierarchy (made up
of diff roles & statuses), operating thru official channels & positions
d. Several related goals which the members of the orgztn share – b/c there’s several related
goals it gets complicated b/c the members may also have their own goals in relation to
the orgztn
i. They will share the several goals but members may have own goals in the
relation to orgztn e.g. may have occupational or personal goals and they want
to move up from hierarchy – becomes complex
3. Examples of formal orgztns:
i. Multinational corps
ii. Provincial govn’ts
iii. Trade unions
iv. School clubs
v. Corner stores
b. Note: many will take the form of a BUREAUCRACY (but not all of them), sociologists
think these are interesting, a bureaucracy can exist in various contexts – in the public
sector, private sector, & in diff kinds of societies (i.e. in capitalist societies & in socialist
societies) → Spoken about by Weber
4. Informal Orgztns
a. Def: orgztns that have loosely related goals and are relateively unstructured
i. They usually exist within formal orgztns
ii. Example: Friendship cliques in schools, personal networks in companies (all
existing w. in foral orgztns – school and company)
b. Friendship cliques – example that helps to examine sociological aspects
i. Friendship cliques involve power relations thr a basic hierarchy – there are
various leaders within friends
ii. There are principles of inclusion and exclusion – friendship exclusion/inclusion
may be based on popularity
iii. There would be use and transmission of info – occurring thru gossip and
rumour
c. Personal Networks in Companies
i. Provide ppl with a sense of community or inclusion
ii. There will also be an exclusion of those considered to be inferior – ppl that are
less liked or less competent
iii. Active channels of info – they will constitute the grapevine within a company
i.e. conversations
iv. They’re diff b/c of number of networks of the work environment
v. They help to humanize formal orgztns by giving human need to an impersonal
context, very distant – having work of personal networks the company doesn’t
seem so distant or non-intimate
vi. Personal networks enable workers to protest and subvert their working
conditions
• Settings for Organizations
o Most formal orgztns will exist in certain settings
▪ Formal orgztns are said to be operated in:
• environments
• niches
• fields
• domains
• industries
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