Social Relations in Organizations: Further Evidence For the Weberian Model

An earlier case study confirmed some elements of a social-psychological formulation of Weber's organizational model and disconfirmed others. Close relationships among authority, control, formal training, and legitimacy were found, but impersonality was not characteristic of the organization, and no evidence was found to link organizational knowledge derived from experience to the distribution of formal training or to the distribuition of unofficial control. The present research replicates this study in four additional organizations. Again the relationships among authority, control, training, and legitimacy are close, and strong evidence against impersonality is found. Finally, an unusual amount of the unofficial control is exercised in all the organizations, but no evidence indicates that this challenges the official structure of authority in any of the organizations. SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES IN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS In the field of organizational analysis a pressing task is to develop a social-psychological model for interpreting the actions of individuals and the ways in which they relate, individually and collectively, to the organizational environment. Theoretical approaches which focus on patterns of social exchange among individuals are useful for some areas of organizational analysis, but insightful as they have been, none of them is sufficient to account for more than a limited range of the activity which takes place in organizations. Homans (1961:2-7, 186-187) indirectly acknowledges this when he states that his model of exchange is limited to direct, faceto-face transactions, and that its applicability is uLnclear when the freedom of the participants is restricted. In fact, exchange theory (including, in addition to Homans, the approaches of Blau [1964] and Thibaut and Kelley [1959]) is generally unable to come to terms convincingly with relationships which are structured by circumstances beyond the control of the individuals involved; this applies especially to those situations where inflexible and/or pronounced differences in organizational power exist among the members. Perhaps a more promising social-psychological approach for organizational analysis is one which builds upon statements about the bases of power and influence in interpersonal relations, especially the theoretical statements of French and Raven ( 1959) and Hopkins (1964). Two good examples of this approach in the organizational literature are the studies reported by Warren (1968) and by Peabody (1962), each of which contributes in an important way to our understanding of the relations among individuals in organizations. Propositions about the behavior of individuals in organizations can also be derived from the classical organization theory of Max Weber (1947). It is the implications of this approach which will be explored here, for it is our conviction that the ideal-typical model of bureaucracy is at least as useful for anticipating the relations among individuals in organizations as it has been for specifying the relationships among different elements of organizational structure. This conviction stems from an earlier study (Miller, 1970) in which several generally overlooked social-psychological hypotheses about the interrelationships among expertise, authority, control, and legitimacy were deduLced from the ideal type and basically confirmed among the members of a small school system. The objective now is to apply the same interpretation of Weber's theoretical system to four additional organizations in order to check