Discussion Questions
1. Where would your university or college department be located on Perrow’s technology
framework? Look for the underlying variety and analyzability characteristics when
making your assessment. Would a department devoted exclusively to teaching be put
in a different quadrant from a department devoted exclusively to research?
2. Explain Thompson’s levels of interdependence. Identify an example of each level of interdependence in the university or college setting. What kinds of coordination mechanisms should an administration develop to handle each level of interdependence?
3. Describe Woodward’s classification of organizational technologies. Explain why each
of the three technology groups is related differently to organization structure and management processes.
4. What relationships did Woodward discover between supervisor span of control and
technological complexity?
5. How do flexible manufacturing and lean manufacturing differ from other manufacturing
technologies? Why are these new approaches needed in today’s environment?
6. What is a service technology? Are different types of service technologies likely to be
associated with different structures? Explain.
7. Mass customization of products has become a common approach in manufacturing
organizations. Discuss ways in which mass customization can be applied to service
firms as well.
8. In what primary ways does the design of service firms typically differ from that of
product firms? Why?
9. A top executive claimed that top-level management is a craft technology because the
work contains intangibles, such as handling personnel, interpreting the environment,
and coping with unusual situations that have to be learned through experience. If this
is true, is it appropriate to teach management in a business school? Does teaching
management from a textbook assume that the manager’s job is analyzable, and hence
that formal training rather than experience is most important?
10. In which quadrant of Perrow’s framework would a mass-production technology be
placed? Where would small-batch and continuous process technologies be placed?
Why? Would Perrow’s framework lead to the same recommendation about organic
versus mechanistic structures that Woodward made?
11. To what extent does the development of new technologies simplify and routinize the
jobs of employees? How can new technology lead to job enlargement? Discuss.
12. Describe the sociotechnical systems model. Why might some managers oppose a sociotechnical systems approach?