Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

      Description

      Figure 5.3 Total Reports of Sexual Assault Made to the Department of Defense, 2007–2017

      Sources: Data from U.S. Department of Defense, “Sexual Assault Prevention and Response,” Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military: Fiscal Year 2017 (Washington, DC: Author, 2014); data for 2014 onward from U.S. Department of Defense, “Appendix B: Statistics on Sexual Assault,” Fiscal Year 2017 (Washington DC: Author, 2015).

      Disasters (and other unplanned outcomes) are deeply problematic for organizations. Such events often occur as the result of rational organizational processes. For example, in the 1980s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) operated based on what it considered to be a highly reliable and rational plan. As a result, it focused on, among many other things, a variety of quantifiable factors to keep the space shuttle Challenger on schedule for its launch. In doing so, the agency cut a number of corners and engaged in various economies. These actions made sense from the perspective of NASA as a rationalized organization. However, they contributed to the disaster on January 28, 1986, in which Challenger’s fuel tank broke apart, causing the in-flight destruction of the shuttle and the deaths of seven crew members.

      Similarly, initial reports on the crashes of two new Boeing 737 Maxs in 2019 suggested that the underlying cause was a rush to get the plane in the air in order to compete with arch-rival Airbus. Boeing may have cut corners in providing, at no additional cost to the airlines, supplementary safety features. The training of pilots was limited, in part, because the airlines did not have flight simulators, or the pilots were not given access to them. However, the most immediate cause of the crashes appears to have been a malfunctioning automated system (Grondahl, Collins and Glanz, 2019).

      Contemporary Changes

      In the last several decades, bureaucratic organizations have undergone a number of important changes that do not fit well with Weber’s view of organizations. Indeed, the very notion, if not reality, of a bureaucracy in Weber’s terms is not only changing rapidly but also in some cases disappearing completely. For one thing, contrary to Weber’s thinking on the likelihood of the growth and spread of bureaucracy in organizations, many of the largest organizations, especially industrial organizations and labor unions, have been forced to downsize and, in the process, reduce the size of their bureaucracies dramatically (Hyman 2018). The idea that “bigger is better” is no longer the rule in most organizations. Instead of constantly adding new functions, and more employees, organizations are now likely to focus on their “core competencies.” For example, the Ford Motor Company is no longer making (among many other things) the steel for the frames of its cars and the rubber for their tires. In addition, in 2018 Ford announced that it was in the process of phasing out, or even dropping, the production of conventional cars and was going to focus in the future on manufacturing the more profitable SUVs and trucks. GM announced a similar cutback a few months later.

      In essence, organizations have come to concentrate on being “lean and mean” (Harrison 1994). They have also sought to streamline their systems of production—to develop lean methods of production using more automated and robotized systems and fewer employees (Janoski 2015). Many newer organizations, such as Facebook and even Google, have learned crucial lessons from the problems experienced by organizational giants such as Ford. They are smaller and far less hierarchical; they are increasingly flat structures with the characteristics of social networks discussed in Chapter 4. They seek to avoid ever losing their focus or becoming too large and diverse. As a result, it is unlikely that they will ever need to downsize or simplify to the degree that Ford (and GM) has in order to accomplish these goals.

      To adapt to a rapidly changing environment, contemporary organizations have also been forced to become more flexible and agile than the ideal-typical bureaucracy suggests. When today’s organizations lack such flexibility, there is a strong likelihood that they will decline or disappear. For instance, the video store chain Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 (as of 2019 it had only one remaining store in Bend, Oregon) because it failed to adapt to competition from Netflix and, at least initially, its movies by mail. More important, it failed to anticipate the streaming of movies to one’s television or computer (and now to both smart TVs and regular TVs connected through devices such as Roku). Customers are no longer willing to travel to a video store when they can stream movies from the comfort of their homes via a cable provider such as Comcast or online from Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon.