Page 343 - Cultures and Organizations

308 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

of a culture; they grew up in families, went to schools, worked for employ-
ers. Their experiences represent the material on which their thinking and
writing have been based. Scholars are as human and as culturally biased
as other mortals.
For each of the four corners of Figure 9.1, we selected a classical author
who described organizations in terms of the model belonging to his corner
of the diagram: the pyramid, the machine, the market, or the family. The
four are approximate contemporaries; all were born in the mid-nineteenth
century.
Henri Fayol (1841–1925) was a French engineer whose management
career culminated in the position of président-directeur-général of a mining
company. After his retirement he formulated his experiences in a ground-
breaking text on organization: Administration industrielle et générale (1916).
On the issue of the exercise of authority, Fayol wrote:

We distinguish in a manager his statutory authority which is in the offi ce,
and his personal authority which consists of his intelligence, his knowledge,
his experience, his moral value, his leadership, his service record, etc. For
a good manager, personal authority is the indispensable complement to
statutory authority. 7

In Fayol’s conception the authority is both in the person and in the rules (the
statute). We recognize the model of the organization as a pyramid of people
with both personal power and formal rules as principles of coordination.
Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German academic with university
training in law and some years’ experience as a civil servant. He became a
professor of economics and a founder of German sociology. Weber quotes
a seventeenth-century Puritan Protestant Christian textbook about “the
sinfulness of the belief in authority, which is only permissible in the form

8
of an impersonal authority.” In his own design for an organization, Weber
describes the bureaucracy. The word was originally a joke, a classic Greek
ending grafted on a modern French stem. Nowadays it has a distinctly
negative connotation, but to Weber it represented the ideal type for any
large organization. About the authority in a bureaucracy, Weber wrote:

The authority to give the commands required for the discharge of (the
assigned) duties should be exercised in a stable way. It is strictly delimited
by rules concerning the coercive means . . . which may be placed at the
disposal of offi cials. 9