One of the consequential puzzles of the Second World War was the sudden, catastrophic collapse of the French army following German invasion in 1940. This is the subject of Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, written in 1940, and it is an event of major historical importance and mystery. The mystery is this: France was a powerful military …
Social change and agency
Much of the drama of history is found in processes of large social and political change, both slow and rapid. The sudden collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and 1990, the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the decades-long rise of the nationalist right in France and the United States, the rise …
Multinational corporate accountability and control during the Nazi period
In a previous post I considered the question of the culpability of multinational corporations with affiliates in wartime Nazi Germany (link). There I discussed a number of books that address this question, including Billstein, Fings, Kugler, and Levis' very important 2000 contribution, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the …
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Good government and the pandemic
Governments at multiple levels are making decisions that affect all of us in ways that really matter. Our health may be protected, or we may contract a serious and life-ending illness; our jobs may be preserved, or we may be furloughed; our savings and retirement funds may be buffered, or they may be wiped out. …
Slime mold intelligence
We often think of intelligent action in terms of a number of ideas: goal-directedness, belief acquisition, planning, prioritization of needs and wants, oversight and management of bodily behavior, and weighting of risks and benefits of alternative courses of action. These assumptions presuppose the existence of the rational subject who actively orchestrates goals, beliefs, and priorities …
High reliability organizations
Charles Perrow takes a particularly negative view of the possibility of safe management of high-risk technologies in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. His summary of the Three Mile Island accident is illustrative: “The system caused the accident, not the operators” (12). Perrow’s account of TMI is chiefly an account of complex and tightly-coupled system processes, …
Organizations as open systems
Key to understanding the "ontology of government" is the empirical and theoretical challenge of understanding how organizations work. The activities of government encompass organizations across a wide range of scales, from the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles (40 employees) to the Department of Defense (861,000 civilian employees). Having the best understanding possible …
Herbert Simon’s theories of organizations
Herbert Simon made paradigm-changing contributions to the theory of rational behavior, including particularly his treatment of "satisficing" as an alternative to "maximizing" economic rationality (link). It is therefore worthwhile examining his views of organizations and organizational decision-making and action -- especially given how relevant those theories are to my current research interest in organizational dysfunction. …
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Theorizing about organizations
The fields of organizational studies and organizational sociology originated in the early twentieth century but flourished in the post-war period. This makes a certain amount of historical sense. The emergence in the nineteenth century of large, complex organizations in business and government became a factor in modern society that dwarfed the impact of the organizations …
Organizations and dysfunction
Ford Rouge Plant A recurring theme in recent months in Understanding Society is organizational dysfunction and the organizational causes of technology failure. Helmut Anheier's volume When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns is highly relevant to this topic, and it makes for very interesting reading. The volume includes contributions by a number of leading …
Understanding Society 