Thursday, November 17, 2011

Organization Theory-39 (Technology)


In the last blog, we discussed buffering and boundary spanning roles. In todays blog, we being understanding another important concept - "technology" and continue the discussion over the next few blogs. 

A general understanding of "technology" is more closely aligned with the concept of science that we know. However, this is pretty different when economists try to define "technology".

The economists and there by the organization theorists look at technology as  a means by which society provides its members with the things that they need and desire. So one can consider organization is a technology for producing a set or subset of the objects and services that society demands. This could be the environment level of analyzing the term technology.

A dive deep into the organization and we could have a completely different perspective - the view of how things are actually done! The organization has number of departments which coordinate amongst each other to provide the material another department needs etc. A complete new technology perspective within the firm. This level of analyze would be at the organization-level

One could go further and discuss these at the tasks in each of these organizational departments. However for clarity sake, we could limit the level of analysis at Organizational and Environmental level. The variations across the organizations is reduced by focusing more on the core technology to produce the organization's primary output.

This simplified view, enables us to compare organizations with different core technologies by which core technologies, by noting key similarities and differences between them. What gets lost in this approach is the details of technology diversity within the organization.

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