MGM400H5 Chapter Notes -Contingency Theory, Meritocracy
Document Summary
The most noted application and extension of the open systems approach is grouped under the heading of contingency theory". Eventually the theoretical developments taking place within the systems tradition culminated in a contingency theory" of organisation which attempted to specify the appropriate functional fit" between environmental settings and the internal organisational structures which they required . Curiously, as a theory, it rested primarily on research that took place largely prior to its own development. The most noted such work was that of burns and stalker (1961), who studied twenty firms in scotland and england drawn mainly from the textile, engineering and electronics industries. Management systems and structures were classified according to a range of environments differentiated by degree of predictability and stability. They found that firms operating in an environment with relatively stable and predictable markets, and to a lesser extent technologies, such as those in textiles, tended to have what they called mechanistic systems.
