On the Control of Complex Industrial Organizations

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This book is concerned with control issues in complex industrial organizations. The word control is used here in a rather wide sense, including decision­ making, coordination and planning as well as activities such as the design and implementation of organizational structures or computerized information systems. There are various ways of defining complexity, here we use this term to indicate that the organizations in question consist of many sub organizations which are operationally interdependent but at the same time have a fair degree of independence of control. The control of the interactions between these suborganizations through coordination will be a key issue in this book. The discussion will be confined to industrial organizations, our results are only applicable to a limited extent to other types of organizations such as universities, hospitals or government offices. The main contribution we intend to make in this book is the development of a system oj concepts on control and coordination in industrial organizations which can be used in the design of organizational control structures such as planning systems, information systems or relations between positions or departments. Rather eclectic use has been made of various scientific disCiplines in the development of this conceptual system with some bias towards the use of system theory and cybernetics. The book is intended for professional workers in the field of 'organizational control technology', such as automation and .organization specialists in complex organizations and workers in the related disCiplines at University.