Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony on JSTOR
American Journal of Sociologyjstor.orgSaved by Jay Matthews
Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony on JSTOR
whenever a spiritual revelation is enshrined in an institution invented to carry its meaning through time, it is easy to understand how its guardians can become overprotective of the treasure they are responsible for, especially if their access to the original vision is theoretical rather than experiential, something they read about, rather than so
... See moreRichard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Institutions sometimes seem like the opposite of imagination. They are formal and bureaucratic, stable and predictable. Yet they can help societies to imagine,
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Institutions are sets of norms and rules that we use to coordinate disparate humans. They guide us towards our vision for the future codified in our values.
National Accelerationism
Casey Matt added
An organizational system takes on a life of its own, selecting, rewarding, and absorbing members into it who then perpetuate the system.
Ronald A. Heifetz • The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the... See more
Jo Freeman • The Tyranny of Stucturelessness
sari added
...we’ve been trained to think of organizations as homogenous and mechanistic, with a clear set of rules, a command-and-control structure, and the ability to leverage hierarchy to get things done quickly by issuing top-down directives to reallocate resources to meet objectives.
Aric Wood • The Organization as a Machine: An Outdated Concept - XPLANE | Organizational Change Management Consulting
Adam Zeiner and added
Under conditions of widespread institutional dysfunction, formal trappings can be disconnected from the core competence with which they are supposedly associated. Sometimes they can even begin to anti-correlate. But assuming the institution in question is not in such a dysfunctional context, the formal trappings of an organization actually do indic... See more
Institutional Failure as Surprise | Samo Burja
Andrei Stoica added
System Justification Theory : Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.