Explaining Informal Work Groups in Complex Organizations: The Case for Autonomy in Structure

The concept autonomy is used as a major tool in an attempt to develop a theory of social integration of complex organizations that adequately handles informal patterns of workers. The argument runs as follows: Workers tend to have narrowly defined tasks; this permits a sphere of autonomy external to work tasks but within the organization. The autonomy tends to be used to bring elements from the worker's culture into the organization. While giving the worker roots in the organization, this at the same time perpetuates his disenfranchisement from the bureaucratic sphere, since the working-class culture contains elements alien to the ethos of bureaucratic procedures. All this makes for a federalistic type of integration of the total organization, with worker allegiance and administrative control remaining distinctly problematical. The theoretical discussion is used to re-examine one of Donald Roy's studies of factory workers. Fred E. Katz is associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.