The Morphology of Organizations

The Structuring of Organizations

“…However, because many of the support units are highly specialized and rely on professional staff, standardization of skills may be the single most important coordinating mechanism. Do the staff groups of the organization-technocratic as weI) as sup port-tend to cluster at any special level of the hierarchy7 One study of twenty-five organizations (Kaufman and Seidman, 1970) suggested that while the middle lines of organizations tend to form into pyramids, the staff does not. Its form is "extremely irregular"-if anything, inversely pyra midal (p. 446).…”

Toward a better understanding of the hierarchical nature of police organizations: Conception and measurement

“…Complex organizations had long-been characterized as pyramids, with a horizontal and vertical dimension (Kaufman & Seidman, 1970). The horizontal dimension referred to such characteristics as the number and composition of special units and the allocation of tasks among organizational members.…”

‘Bureaucracy‐lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work

“…In fact, much of the concern of empirical studies of organizational structures in the 1960s and 1970s was with documenting these variations. Hierarchy was shown to vary in terms of the length of the chain of command, with organizations relatively 'tall' or 'flat' (Carzo and Yanouzas, 1969) and with 'spans of control' relatively wide or narrow (Van Fleet and Bedeian, 1977) and hence, bureaucratic organizations were shown to vary in 'shape' from that of the traditional pyramid (Kaufman and Seidman, 1970). Bureaucratic organization was also shown to be compatible with different forms of specialization, based on products, markets or geographical areas as well as functions (Koontz, O'Donnell and Weihrich, 1984), different forms of rules (Gouldner, 1955) or the degree to which and way in which work roles are narrowly defined (Child, 1972).…”