This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.
This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.
Original Description:
Identities, Boundaries and Soci - Charles Tilly 97
This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.
This document summarizes how social structures and scripts help organizations function. It discusses how Marge Kirk, a female truck driver, had to improvise to navigate the overwhelmingly male environment through developing local knowledge and blending different scripts. Organizations rely on common configurations like hierarchies, chains, and triads that provide familiar scripts and generate common knowledge to lower transaction costs. The effectiveness of these configurations depends on the familiarity people have with the organizational structure and local practices. New members of organizations like military academies initially lack this familiarity, so the structures are intensively scripted until the recruits can improvise within established norms. Managers often import familiar configurations to ease the incorporation of new organizational members.
It takes a lot of energy just to stand your ground—balancing male
egos with your right to survive. I wanted a job, I wanted to be a good
truck driver, I wanted to be able to pull my weight as a driver. So years have passed now and somehow I survived. The guys are beginning to see me as a real human, not just a broad with legs and boobs. And the dispatcher has passed to the point of seeing me as a driver, I think. (Schroedel 1985: 156–57)
Marge Kirk, a woman in an overwhelmingly male job, had worked her
way by means of incessant improvisation to a unique combination of scripts and local knowledge. Our five configurations—chains, hierarchies, triads, organizations, and categorical pairs—provide widely available scripts. They rely on common knowledge, for example, shared understandings of how superiors and inferiors signal their relations to each other. They also generate common knowledge as people use them, for example, by relying on third parties in triads to patch up disagreements within any particular pair. Together, familiar scripts and accumulated common knowledge lower transaction costs of whatever activities an organization carries on. They thereby raise relative costs of shifting to some other structure of social ties. Managers of organizations ordinarily adopt the five configurations in various combinations as devices for managing social relations within the diagram’s midsection, where some scripting and common knowledge combine. How the configurations work, indeed, depends importantly on where in the two-dimensional space they fall. When goldsmiths who have common knowledge of their craft work together for the first time, they may use familiar scripts to establish hierarchies of reward and deference, but they can start to produce golden articles without extensive ritual. New cadets in military academies, however, ordinarily lack familiarity with both organizational structure and local lore; their superiors make up for those deficiencies by intensive scripting and drumming in of common knowledge. Only later do superiors let military recruits improvise within the limits set by well-known scripts. Activating the emulation mechanism, managers of organizations often accomplish their work by importing configurations—particular hierarchies, chains, triads, and categorical pairs—with which new organizational members already have considerable experience and