Power and Uncertainty in Organization.

The article focuses on the problems of power in the development of the bureaucratic phenomenon. Here the author examines the resources that are provided for us by the successive theories that have been proposed as explanations of the functioning of organizations. Power is a very difficult problem with which to deal in the theory of organization. It refers to a kind of relationship that is neither unidimensional nor predictable like the kind of stimulus-response relationship which social psychologists found so rewarding to study when they began to use scientific methods for understanding organizational behavior. A brief review of the place that power problems have had in the development of modern organizational theory gives a clearer perspective of their implications for the present and enables one to understand better the general framework. Power problems were not squarely faced by the sociologists, social psychologists, and philosophers of the thirties and forties, whose human relations approach nevertheless made it possible to challenge more fundamentally the rationale of the classical theory.