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Organizational Restructuring |
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Baar and Makabe's article illustrates the requirements for organizational restructuring aimed at moving away from a bureaucratic structure, to what they call a "flexible structure". The differences between the two forms are striking. For bureaucracies, the organization of production processes is seen as a constant, and standardized rules and procedures and preprogrammed behaviours maintain the status quo. By contrast, flexible organizations seek the constant redesign of their production processes to capitalize on fleeting opportunities. Coordination is not achieved through standardized rules, procedures and behaviours, but through an ongoing process of mutual adjustment, learning and teamwork.
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Where bureaucracies place great emphasis on centrally developed, stable plans which preprogram methods, flexible organizations pursue strategies formulated lower down, because they realize that methods should be determined by opportunities uncovered "on the move". As a result, production workers in bureaucracies have little discretion or authority, whereas workers in flexible organizations are expected to learn and think, and exercise greater discretion.
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Where bureaucracies monitor activities, seeking to detect errors and enforce conformity to rules and specifications, flexible organizations monitor negative feedback (advice and suggestions regarding mistakes or low performance), and entropy (waste, inefficiency, the loss of energy and organizational decay). Where jobs in bureaucracies are characterized by rigid descriptions and high degrees of specialization (through the simplification of individual tasks), jobs in flexible organizations are held by multiskilled, generalists who can be rapidly redeployed to other functions in the organization's operations, as the day to day situation demands.
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Seeking to maximize return on investment (a short-term objective), bureaucracies mistakenly believe that productivity depends on output per worker. Conversely, flexible organizations seek to maximize market share (a long-term objective), and recognize that productivity depends on the smoothness of the organization's processes. Bureaucracies use top-down information flows to direct their workforce, whereas flexible organizations use ongoing, two-way communication between workers and managers, to continuously redesign production processes and reformulate winning strategies.
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Baar, Ellen., Makabe, Tomoko. Bureaucratic and Flexible Structures: The Transition from American to Japanese Management. Paper presented to the 1988 annual meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Windsor, Ontario.
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