"Documents and records can seldom be taken for what they purport to be. They are not neutral and objective accounts of organizational purposes and activities but reflect the biases and interests of those who compile and use them. To take at face value reports of such complex and sensitive matters as costs, productivity, or hiring priorities is naive."
—W. Richard Scott
"Contingency theory is guided by the general orienting hypothesis that organizations whose internal features best match the demands of their environments will achieve the best adaptation."
—W. Richard Scott
"Institutions consist of cognitive, normative and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour. Institutions are transported by various carriers – cultures, structures, and routines – and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction."
—W. Richard Scott
"Organizations play a leading role in our modern world. Their presence affects - some would insist that the proper term us infects - virtually every sector of contemporary social life."
—W. Richard Scott
"Different subunits within an organization may confront different external demands. To cope with these various environments, organizations create specialized subunits with differing structural features. For example, some subunits may exhibit higher levels of formalization than others; some may be more centralized in decision making; some may be oriented to longer planning horizons. The more varied the types of environments confronted by an organization, the more differentiated its structure needs to be."
—W. Richard Scott
"With the introduction of open system models, a field mired in shop-worn distinctions and unproductive debates suddenly surged to life. One after another, innovative theoretical frameworks and arguments were introduced, each of which afforded new insights into the determinants of organizational structure."
—W. Richard Scott
"Transactions that are relatively uncertain and complex call for more elaborate mechanisms of governance to insure security for the parties involved. One such mechanism is the organization, which attempts to align interests and creates control systems to discourage opportunistic behavior."
—W. Richard Scott
"The structure and functioning of organizations have consequences, both for the organizations themselves as well as for their wider host societies. Whereas economists and management theorists have focused on identifying organizational factors that affect performance and productivity, sociologists have raised questions about who benefits and who does not (or suffers) from these activities."
—W. Richard Scott
"Sociologists have also raised troubling questions about tightly coupled, complex organizations touted for their fail-safe reliability, such as nuclear reactors and airline safety systems. Their complexity and interdependence of parts is such that accidents must be expected and, indeed, are 'normal'.”
—W. Richard Scott
"Rather than organizations serving as agents under our control to assist us in pursuing our goals, we more often spend our time and energy serving as the agents of organizations as they pursue their specialized and limited ends."
—W. Richard Scott
"When most of the important information needed to compete effectively is found at the boundaries of organizations rather than at the core, then centralized command/control structures become dysfunctional and obsolete."
—W. Richard Scott
"The emergence of new capital markets, dominated by institutional rather than individual investors, threatens the internal power structure of organizations, which during the past half-century had witnessed the ascendance of the professional manager. It may well be that the age of “managerial capitalism” has come to an end, although the declining power of the corporate elite may be offset by the rise in power of managers of pension funds and other institutional investors."
—W. Richard Scott
"In the United States, corporations enjoy the advantage of being treated legally as persons with the right of free speech, expressed primarily through the medium of lobbies and financial campaign contributions. Corporate power and political influence have never been stronger."
—W. Richard Scott