Mickel Hoback

Knowledge and theories about organizations

The readings this week covered knowledge and theories about organizations. The chapter several organizational theories including the Classical Organizational, Human Relations, Feminist and Culture-Quality Ecosystems. It discussed how we have evolved from the Classical model in which the workplace was rigid and workers were told what to do with close supervision, to the other more current models such as the Contingency model in which all organizational elements are dependent on other elements and that there is no one best approach to managing employees. It explained that no organization is perfect and that some organizations are better places to work than others. While reading this I often thought back to several of the jobs I had growing up and tried to identify which theory they fit in.
The chapter also reviewed the scientific management concept and the administrative theory of management. In the scientific model employees were pushed to work as hard as possible to make more money for the company while little or no respect for the workers was given. In the administrative theory things changed and management began to form a clear hierarchy of authority to avoid confusion, enhance consistency, and maximize productivity. Workers were given one boss to report to and knew what was expected of them.
While all this was useful information I kept thinking back to the beginning of the chapter in which organizations were defined and explained. The chapter explained that organizations were social entities that were goal-directed. It mentioned organizations that handled social services within the community and explained that the goal was to improve people’s health, enhance their quality of life and support families and help people improve their functioning in the social environment. I could not help but think of what most people in society think when they hear the word social services. I can almost guarantee you they don’t think of an agency such as the one just mentioned.
In today’s society social services has become synonymous with child protective services which has the reputation of being the exact opposite of what was just described. I do understand that CPS has a job to do in protecting children that can’t protect themselves and many of them I have meet in my career are wonderful at their job, however society has begun to think of CPS as an agency to imposes its will on them and are now fearful that whenever something goes wrong they may see them at their door trying to “take” their children. Somewhere along the line we as a society have gotten lost when a parent has to worry about how they are raising their children out of fear of having them taken away.
Like I said I do believe that their job is a very important one in which they are task with protecting children in danger but I do believe that somewhere along the path the line was crossed and they took on more power than actually afforded to them under the law. Maybe if parents were allowed to raise their children the way they should we would not have overcrowding in juvenile jails. Yep, overcrowding in juvenile jails……. Guess the system is not working too well with the present guidelines, maybe we should let the parents take back the task of raising their own children and see how it goes. I know several people will disagree with this but all you have to do is look at history. Social workers were actually brought in to reservations to help the families and the females with personal issues but over time the workers interjected themselves into a position of power over these same families and lost the trust of the workers. All these years later many Native American individuals still don’t trust the agency and have all but abandoned seeking help from them for other issues.