What Counts in the Death or Transformation of an Organization?

Abstract

This study of conditions making for the decline of an organization examines a college from the advent of charismatic leadership (emerging in a crisis) through its routinization to the period of decline. Critical factors in its decline are revealed as: sharp discontinuities in succession of personnel (faculty, student traits to be processed), absentee leadership and Trustees unable to give or respond to early warning signals, program innovations resisted by workers, or that workers were incompetent to execute, external programs that siphoned resources from the parent organization, and conditions in the social surround that contributed to disruption. The central orienting notion is that factors making for decline or death emerge at the intersection of an organization's legacy-its inherited purpose, procedures, and product-and influences that pour through its permeable boundary from its social and cultural environment. This composition has a minor and a major key. There is on the one hand the astounding decline in an organization's fortunes. On this score, like the ghost in Hamlet, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood ... (I-v-15). For as with any artistic or intellectual creation, it is sad and perplexing to see a social creation vandalized. But that, except incidentally, is not the tale I would unfold. Mine is a happier tale in a major key, the story of the useful insights from the lore Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, 1985. Support for the research underlying this statement was provided by the Lilly Endowment Inc. I must thank my good teacher, Amos Hawley, for his review of this paper which embodies just a few of the ideas I started swiping from him as far back as 1950. Address correspondence to the author, Department of Sociology, Hamilton Hall 070A, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. ? 1985 The University of North Carolina Press