Talk:Formal organization

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[edit] Removed from article

The following strikes me as redundant; I have cut it. If anyone thinks that there is anything here that is not already said in the article, please feel free to restore the relevant portion, preferably with some improvement to the writing. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:37, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

Formal organization acts, for example, around defining the division of labor, description of operational sequences, or definition of instruction powers. Formal organization is defined, however, only by its opposite, with both forms supplementing each other. A distinction between formal and informal organization would not be necessary if each coworker, or else each working group would find its own creative way to implement policies from superior levels of the hierarchy.

[edit] Meyer and Rowan

The article includes a lengthy (perhaps too lengthy) quotation that was attributed only as "JOHN MEYER AND BRIAN ROWAN, 1976". I removed the unorthodox use of uppercase, but I still have no idea what piece this comes from, which leaves this a rather weak citation.

I'm way outside any of my areas of expertise here, but I gather that Meyer and Rowan were among the pioneers of the concept of formal organizations, and they wrote quite a few papers together in the late 1970s. I'm unaware of anything they published together as early as 1976—"Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony" is 1977—but, conversely, I suspect that if they published a paper together that year, then they may well have published more than one. In any case, a citation that is presumably from a paper in a journal should say what paper in what journal. - Jmabel | Talk 19:44, 25 December 2006 (UTC)