Modern Organization - Softcover

Thompson, Victor A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817348387 ISBN 13: 9780817348380

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2015

Modern Organization is a classic text of organization development that addresses the complications that occur in power structures within which workers with specialized skills are managed by superiors without those skills. Thompson is interested in exploring and righting the creative tensions between knowledge and power, demonstrating that within hierarchical structures, the wielders of power often lack not only the technical know-how of their employees but charisma and other attributes that would win the loyalty and confidence of those employees. Thompson coins the phrase “bureaupathic” behavior to describe the rise in a perceived need for regulations and rituals that result from the insecurity in these structures. This behavior only confounds working life and efficiency. Technical specialization is rapidly advancing, while cultural definitions of authority are not. Authority must be redefined in order to make allowances for its limitations. What once made a leader, namely charisma, may no longer suffice.

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About the Author:

Victor A. Thompson earned a PhD from Columbia University and taught at Illinois Institue of Technology (1950-62) and the University of Florida, Gainesville (1971-81). His books include Bureaucracy and Innovation and Bureaucracy and the Modern World.

Review:

"Dr. Thompson's book presents some interesting new ideas . . . stimulating refinements of previously expounded concepts, and . . . a worthwhile syntheses of many ideas previously expressed by many other writers."
―Social Forces

“By utilizing a sociological approach to the problem of organizational theory, Thompson has developed the thesis that there is a growing imbalance between the right to administer and the ability to do so. The traditional organizational theory involves the monistic qualities of hierarchy, authority, and its consequent rights as a part of the role of one who commands. As science and technology have developed, the superordinate has lost to the specialists (persons skilled in a number of specific programs or units of purposive action) the ability to command in one field after another even though he retained the right to do so. Rationalism, in the common meaning of the word, has been substituted for impulse.”
―Journal of Politics

"What [Thompson] has written is a plea for according specialists in organizations greater influence than they now enjoy. The argument is supported by a vast and skillfully selected array of documentation and is illuminated by some rich insights into the dynamics of organization."
―Administrative Science Quarterly

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