ABSTRACT
Complex organizations—manufacturing firms, hospitals, schools, armies, community agencies—are ubiquitous in modem societies, but our understanding of them is limited and segmented. The fact that impressive and sometimes frightening consequences flow from organizations suggests that some individuals have had considerable insight into these social instruments. This chapter discusses that the rational model results from a closed-system strategy for studying organizations, and that the natural-system model flows from an open- system strategy. Administrative-management literature focuses on structural relationships among production, personnel, supply, and other service units of the organization; and again employs as the ultimate criterion economic efficiency. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival, and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment.
