76: Comparative Analysis of Organizations – Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow (1925-2019) was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University, whose career spanned six decades. He was a prolific author who devoted much of his life examining the impacts of complex organizations on society. Included in his later works were studies on the Fukiyama disaster in Japan, the U.S. financial crisis of the late 2000s, organized responses to AIDS, and the global warming crisis. He took keen interest in how accidents in high risk systems occurred and how to protect critical infrastructure from terrorist attack.

This work was grounded in an understanding of organizational analysis as a comparative affair directly engaged with the concrete realities of organizing, as typical of classic organization theory. In this episode, we discuss one of his earliest works, a 1967 article published in the American Sociological Review, “A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations.” This short article proposed a framework based on four “organizational dimensions:” the character of the work (are there few or many problems and can they be analyzed?), the nature of the raw material (e.g., tangible objects or intangible symbols), and task interdependence and social structures. Chiefly among them is what the author call “technology” which is contemporary times would be taken to mean both the work to be performed and the systems in place to accomplish it. And Perrow proposed that this was a productive “basis” for comparing organizations according to its variability (the extent labor process involves routinized procedures) and analyzability (the extent exceptional cases can be handled through standards), variables which have become central for subsequent research.

Although much of the insights for Perrow’s work stems from the world of industrial organizations, the insights around the power and value of analytical concepts for organizational analysis across industries endures. And the work is also a great reminder of the promise of using comparisons not just to understand concrete organizations but also to examine the relative relevance of particular theories for explaining particular types of organizations and work.

Part 1. Perrow’s work-based framework for researching organizations (released 11 May 2021)

Part 2. How can we study organizations comparatively? (released 18 May 2021)

Read with us:

Perrow, C. (1967). A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations. American Sociological Review, 32(2), 194-208.

To Learn More:

Carton, A. M. (2018). “I’m not mopping the floors, I’m putting a man on the moon”: How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(2), 323-369.

Greenwood, R., Hinings, C. R., & Whetten, D. (2014). Rethinking institutions and organizations. Journal of management studies, 51(7), 1206-1220.

McKinley, W. (2010). Organizational theory development: Displacement of ends? Organization Studies, 31(1), 47-68.

Pugh, D. S., Hickson, D. J., Hinings, C. R., & Turner, C. (1968). Dimensions of organization structure. Administrative Science Quarterly, 13(1), 65-105.