SOCIOLOGICAL NOR PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY

Neither sociological nor psychological theory makes a significant contribution to the effective practice of human resource management

Sociological Nor Psychological Theory

Introduction

Past approaches to the study of social problems and social behaviour have been limited by a lack of adequate conceptual tools. This limitation has been manifest both in psychology and sociology, although in different ways.

Psychologists have been characteristically unable or willing to deal with the fact of social organization and social structure. Societies and organizations consist of patterned behaviours, and the behaviour of each individual is determined to a considerable extent by the requirements of the larger pattern. This context is not often incorporated into psychological theories. Some such theories -the psychoanalytic, for example- deal with the influence of the family on the individual. Others take some account of the small group as the individual environment, and still others are concerned with the influence of culture, that most global of environmental concepts. Even social psychology, however, has neglected the organizational and institutional level, and textbooks of social psychology typically conclude with some treatment of small face-to-face groups. This book is an attempt to extend such discussions by beginning where many left off-with the behaviour of people in organizations. It is in that sense a second book in social psychology.

The older sociological theories reflect a limitation complementary to the theories of psychology. Sociological theories treat the superorganic or collective level without reference to individual characteristics or to the attributes of transactions between individuals. They are concerned with the products of such interaction but not with the process. This general criticism must be modified for Marx and Durkhiem, but is applicable nevertheless.

This book proposes that the resolution of such theoretical difficulties can best be achieved by means of open-system theory. This theoretical approach is not yet fully developed, but is exemplified by several important lines of work. These include the event-structure theory of F.H.Allport, the general systems approach of J.G.Miller and his colleagues, and the sociological theory of Talcott Parsons. Open-systems theory seems to us to permit assumption of entropy, the necessary dependence of any organization upon its environment. The open-system concepts of energic input and maintenance point to the motives and behaviour of the individuals who are the carriers of energies input for human organizations; the concept of output and its necessary absorption by the larger environment also links the micro- and macro levels of discourse. For all these reasons, open-system theory represents the point of departure for the topics whish follow.

Organizations and the system concept

The open-system approach to organizations is contrasted with common-sense approaches, which tend to accept popular names and stereotypes as basic organization in terms of the goals of its founder and leaders.

The open-system approach, on the other hand, begins by identifying and mapping the repeated cycles of input, transformation, output, and renewed input which compromise the organizational represents the adaptation of work in biology and in the physical sciences by Von Bertalanffy and ...