Soc120Week4Paper

Evolution of Formal Organizations
Ryon Groff
Soc 120

This essay will revolve around the idea that formal organizations with conventional bureaucratic organizational structure could almost always benefit by changing to a much more organized structure. Certain topics that will be discussed are trends in formal organizations, the evolution of formal organizations over the past century, differences between formal and informal organizations, trends in formal organizations, characteristics needed for formal organizations to evolve and researched material on the rends in formal organizations.

For years formal organizations, employers, and employees have all operated in a very similar fashion. (Kieser, A., 1989). There were many things that changed between the initial idea of the organization, and how things ended up being done. As long as there have been organizations, most formal organizations operated under what we call conventional bureaucracy.

Conventional Bureaucracy is known for it’s many levels, in that we see as the pyramid (White, D 2004). The pyramid begins will high level employees, with most of the power and few people, and works its way down, becoming larger groups of people who have less authority in the organization. There are many challenges that these types of organizations face. To me it seems that the more a person showed a strong work ethic, the easier it was for them to move up the pyramid. In the past, most work was done by hand, really back-breaking work. More recently, there have been so many technological advances that it has eliminated some of this difficult work, and people have been replaced by machines, think about an automobile assembly line.With technology evolving, and work quickly changing, how we operate our organizations today will be nothing like the way we operate these organizations in the future, and are very different from the way it was done in the past.

As stated in the paragraph above, technology has helped us...