Raymond F. Zammuto

Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization sciences interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances---visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality---that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue “Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function” are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the “black boxes” of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.

Coping with disciplinary fragmentation

Each may speak to the very general concern of &dquo;behavior in organizations,&dquo; but few have much to say to one another. We wish to argue here that this fragmentation penalizes the profession in a variety of ways; some of which are sketched in the following section. In later sections, we propose an approach which may help the discipline cope with, or perhaps even reduce the costs of fragmentation.

Evidence‐Based Management in Practice: Opening Up the Decision Process, Decision‐Maker and Context

Evidence‐based management (EBM) has been subject to a number of persuasive critiques in recent years. Concerns have been raised that: EBM over‐privileges rationality as a basis for decision‐making; ‘scientific’ evidence is insufficient and incomplete as a basis for management practice; understanding of how EBM actually plays out in practice is limited; and, although ideas were originally taken from evidence‐based medicine, individual‐situated expertise has been forgotten in the transfer. To address these concerns, the authors adopted an approach of ‘opening up’ the decision process, the decision‐maker and the context (Langley et al. ([Langley, A., 1995]). ‘Opening up decision making: the view from the black stool’, Organization Science, 6, pp. 260–279). The empirical investigation focuses on an EBM decision process involving an operations management problem in a hospital emergency department in Australia. Based on interview and archival research, it describes how an EBM decision process was enacted by a physician manager. It identifies the role of ‘fit’ between the decision‐maker and the organizational context in enabling an evidence‐based process and develops insights for EBM theory and practice.

Environmental Change, Enrollment Decline and Institutional Response: Speculations on Retrenchment in Colleges and Universities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of environmental change and institutional response that shows why a variety of strategies are required by colleges and universities in dealing with declining enrollments. Much as been written in recent years about how institutional leadership should plan for and react to declining enrollments, but no comprehensive overview of the problem or response to it has emerged (Whetten, 1981). Enrollment decline has been treated as an undifferentiated phenomenon that affects all institutions in much the same manner. As a result, the strategies for coping with enrollment decline suggested in the literature are often portrayed as being universally applicable. In this paper we argue that there are different types of environmental conditions that cause enrollment decline and that require different types of institutional retrenchment strategies. The paper is divided into three parts. First, a model of environmental decline is developed and its application to higher education explored. Second, data on college and university enrollments between 1976 and 1979 are presented to illustrate

Organizational decline and management education

Management education seeks to improve students’ ability to manage organizations by instructing them in theoreticallyand empirically-based precepts of management practice. In part, this goal has been pursued through a variety of course offerings in the organization sciences, with topics ranging from interpersonal behavior to organization-environment relations. Even though considerable progress has been made toward meeting this objective, management education now faces the spectre of becoming irrelevant to

Multilevel Latent Polynomial Regression for Modeling (In)Congruence Across Organizational Groups The Case of Organizational Culture Research

This article addresses (in)congruence across different kinds of organizational respondents or “organizational groups”—such as managers versus non-managers or women versus men—and the effects of congruence on organizational outcomes. We introduce a novel multilevel latent polynomial regression model (MLPM) that treats standings of organizational groups as latent “random intercepts” at the organization level while subjecting these to latent interactions that enable response surface modeling to test congruence hypotheses. We focus on the case of organizational culture research, which usually samples managers and excludes non-managers. Reanalyzing data from 67 hospitals with 6,731 managers and non-managers, we find that non-managers perceive their organizations’ cultures as less humanistic and innovative and more controlling than managers, and we find that less congruence between managers and non-managers in these perceptions is associated with lower levels of quality improvement in organizations. Our results call into question the validity of findings from organizational culture and other research that tends to sample one organizational group to the exclusion of others. We discuss our findings and the MLPM, which can be extended to estimate latent interactions for tests of multilevel moderation/interactions.

Enrollment Decline: Perceptions and Responses

Abstract: This paper examines college and university responses to enrollment decline. Two perspectives on decline are identified in the literature: environmental constraints and organizational process and choice. Each perspective is described, identified, and tested on a sample of small-to-medium size universities and colleges. The results indicate that organizational responses to decline are shaped by how members perceive decline. Thus, perceptions rather than objective evidence of decline seem more useful in predicting responses to decline. The paper discusses implications of these findings.

Enrollment Projections: The Case Against Generalizations

Abstract: Generalizations from research that uses heterogeneous samples of colleges and universities can be misleading. This study examines the impact of several environmental and institutional factors on college and university enrollments between 1975–76 and 1980–81. They made separate enrollment analyses of public and private two- and four-year institutions, and of the major doctoral, comprehensive, and baccalaureate institutions of four-year schools. They found that the effects of environmental and institutional factors varied, depending on the institutional type and control.