Four Perspectives on Organizations This note describes four images or metaphors on organizations that provide distinctive lenses or paradigms for thinking about behavior in organizations, understanding its causes, and developing programs for change. Note that each image or metaphor draws attention to a limited set of organizational properties and characteristics critical to understanding, but pays scant attention to a number of other aspects that are beyond its scope. Thus, they focus attention and interest, but in extremely simplistic ways that obscure the richness of organizational phenomena. Presumably, managers equipped with the ability to see organizations through different lenses will achieve greater understanding. Organizations as machines This was the first image to dominate managerial thinking about the nature of organizations. The industrial revolution brought with it the growth of large-scale organizations and the need to develop ways of managing them. Before that, organizations were smaller, typically owner-managed, and relatively few employees could be directly supervised by the owner. The evolution of factory technologies, combined with the growth of efficient capital markets, allowed small organizations to grow in the latter part of the 1800s. In the process, the number of owners often increased, and most were passive shareholders with no role of active management. At the same time, massive immigration in the latter part of the 19th century provided businesses with large reserves of cheap labor to operate new machinery, and the number of employees often grew rapidly. These changes led to a growing demand for “professional” managers capable of organizing and controlling the workforce for the mass production of rather simple goods to serve the interests of absentee owners. Armies, churches, and governments provided the first management theorists in the United States with their ideas. just models of what efficient organizations might look like at scale. In any case, the highly bureaucratic structures suggested that factories engaged in mass production should be designed as highly specialized machines capable of maximizing efficiency. Efforts to design organizations as machines have proven extremely effective and clearly play a role in the emerging dominance of the U.S. economy in the 20th century. This design pattern focuses on several organizational properties:1. Mission, objectives, strategies, planning and control. If we take seriously the idea that it is useful to think of organizations as machines, the first question that arises has to do with the purpose of the machine since different machines are needed for different purposes.