On the Geometry of Organizations

Abstract

In the era of scientific management and increasing rigor in the social sciences, there has been wide appeal in the idea that a simple geometric model could provide predictive and prescriptive information on the growth and design of social and economic organizations. And in the recent years that have seen the development of organic and open system theories of organizational behavior, the idea of biological geometries and related biological notions such as homeostatic equilibrium have been increasingly used by the social scientists to construct their models. The new behavioral scientists and organizational theorists have been particularly attracted to this course by the chance to legitimize their activity since it leads readily to quantification. Increasingly, attempts are being made to find empirical data which will support analogies to phenomena well established in the biological sciences. In the rush to become quantitative-and thus scientific-leaps of fancy have been taken to explain data generated from all kinds of economic, social, and political organizations. In this paper, the writer reappraises some attempts to fit empirical data derived from organizational statistics to biological and geometric models. The purpose is not so much to compare one analogy with another, as it is to suggest there is a lack of evidence for these biological or geometric analogies. William H. McWhinney is assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business Administration, University of California, Los Angeles.