Introduction: A Summer of Change at HDO
HDO took a new step this summer: We employed new instructors in all three of our summer courses. For several years Dr. Zach Elkins (Government) taught Structure of Organizations; Dr. Polly Strong (Anthropology and Native American & Indigenous Studies) taught our Cultural Perspectives on Organizations; and one of our inaugural instructors, Dr. Dan Bonevac (Philosophy), taught our Organizational Ethics course. All of those wonderful scholars and instructors had to step away from HDO teaching for a variety of reasons and competing commitments. We are so grateful for their many years of service to HDO.
A sure sign of HDO’s health and appeal was the ease with which we were able to successfully staff all three courses with field experts, all of whom now know what a pedagogic pleasure it is to teach in the HDO Program. Dr. Kim Pernell (Sociology, an expert on organizational and economic sociology) stepped in to team-teach our Structure of Organizations course; Dr. Chad Seales (Religious Studies, an expert on religion in the American culture and in the workplace) took over our Culture course; and Dr. Cory Juhl (Philosophy, an expert on the philosophy of science) assumed responsibility for our Ethics class.
Today’s blog will focus on our Structure of Organizations course, team-taught this summer by Dr. Pernell and the HDO Director, Dr. Mary R. Rose. We want to explain why this course is such an important part of our curriculum.
Why Organizational Structure Matters
The topic of structure of organization can be hard to define, particularly when the same aspect of an organization can be both an issue of “structure” and of “culture.” For example, if an organization has a very “flat” structure, in which lots of people have responsibility for decision making and discretion to develop different areas, that implicates structure (there is a non-hierarchical organization chart), but it also is a statement about their preferred organizational culture (they want to empower individual people to step up and “own” multiple parts of a project). Likewise, law is a type of structural force acting on an organization, but it also shapes an institution’s culture – as when people in an organization fret about being sued and hesitate a good deal before making final decisions.
Building a Strong Foundation: Core Concepts
Accepting that there may be overlap with other issues – and other courses – the aim for our course was to introduce students to some classic, core notions of structural aspects of an organization. A central point was that the way that an organization is set up or designed can have real implications for the behavior of the people within it—and the structure of the environment the organization inhabits matters too. Students read about and discussed all of the following:
- One very important and common organizational form, bureaucracy, and different meanings of organizational complexity
- The meaning of organizational “legitimacy” and the practices that tend to flow from attempts to establish and demonstrate legitimacy
- What it means for people to perceive legitimacy in authorities and, when that breaks down, the types of disputing behavior that can occur in organizations
- The different types of networks that emerge and operate within and across organizations, as well as the critical power of such networks for innovating and finding new paths.
In the final weeks of the course, we brought all of these themes together with an intensive study of the many practices that organizations have used to diversify their management ranks in the last several decades and the implications of adopting those practices. Students finished the course by taking one or two of these course themes and demonstrating their influence for a change proposal they developed, wrote-up, and presented.
Relevance in Today’s World
Current events often remind us of the relevance of the topics we covered. To take one example, throughout 2025 the White House has claimed that its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and other efforts to reshape and close federal agencies has been motivated by a promises of “rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from our federal bureaucracy.” The goal of such innovation is to put people into leadership who will “go wild” and innovate, who will question long-standing practices – a form of “moving fast and breaking things,” to use a popular Silicon Valley adage – and who will be suspicious of agency experts, who may be seen as entrenched. Indeed, even before all these efforts, “bureaucracy” and “bureaucratic” have long been common terms that people marshal to paint a picture of an organization that is the opposite of efficient and effective (think of the last time you heard a joke about the DMV).
But is bureaucracy always a bad thing? This summer our HDO students learned, perhaps to their surprise, that one of sociology’s most influential theorists, Max Weber, believed that, far from being a problem, bureaucracy represents the most efficient and rational way for goal-oriented, collective missions among people to be organized. Writing in the early 20th century, Weber expected this model of organizing human effort to inevitably come to define all public and private organizations that execute large, complex tasks. Huh? How could such a word with so many bad connotations be so idealized?
Weber’s Five Components of Bureaucracy
Significantly, students learned that Weber meant something quite specific when he described a “bureaucratic” structure. Sociologists typically define a bureaucracy as having five necessary components:
- Formal Rules – activity within the organization is guided by formal rules that can be described and discerned by anyone; what constitutes “good’ and “bad” actions are not left to the whims of one person.
- Specialized Roles – in modern parlance, people “know their lanes” and work on tasks in which they have specific expertise.
- Impersonality – the rules and expectations for the organization are enacted regardless of the interests of any single person; decisions are impartial and do not involve favoritism or nepotism.
- Merit-Based Hiring – people are hired because they have (or can be trained to have) a particular expertise, not because of whom they may know in the organization.
- Full Commitment to the Position – people identify with their roles and believe that doing their jobs accomplishes higher purposes.
A Thought Experiment: Life Without Bureaucracy
In other words, “bureaucracy” involved a full-throated commitment to professionalism, to transparency in procedures and operations, and to a system that allows people to do their jobs without fear or favor. With this meaning on the table, our students were better positioned to discuss the actual pros and cons of bureaucracy, rather than its caricatures. The class walked through a thought experiment of an organization that does not have a bureaucratic structure. Such an organization might, in theory, be better positioned to be nimble and change, but people in that organization may not be able to easily discern how to do their jobs, leaving new hires to have to reinvent the wheel. Employees may not easily know the rules – and when they have broken them – and may not trust that any consequence they face for violating a rule would be applied to the next person. They may be unable to trust that the most-qualified person occupies a given role; other employees may be there because they impressed a boss, knew a colleague, or otherwise got a job for reasons other than merit.
A less bureaucratic structure need not inevitably have these bad characteristics – and our students walked through some significant downsides to, for example, the concept of “impersonality” (aka “heartlessness”) in a bureaucratic structure. But particularly during a time when powerful people seem to assume that breaking down existing structures, or criticizing people who are deeply embedded in their jobs as experts, is good because bureaucracy can have problems, HDO helped our students gain a deeper and richer understanding of what “bureaucratic” can actually mean.
Dr. Mary R. Rose
Director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program at UT Austin and Professor of Sociology
Her research focuses on lay participation in the legal system and public perceptions of justice, with publications on jury selection, trial innovations, and court practices. She has served as an editor for leading journals, is a Fellow of the National Civil Justice Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Her work has been cited in multiple U.S. Supreme Court cases, reflecting its impact on law and policy.
Dr. Kim Pernell
Assistant Professor of Sociology at UT Austin and Associate in the Human Dimensions of Organizations program
She is an economic and organizational sociologist whose research focuses on the causes and consequences of risky and harmful organizational behavior, particularly in banking and finance. Her award-winning work, including her book Visions of Financial Order, explores how national regulatory systems shape bank behavior and how shifts in the U.S. financial system influence inequality and other social outcomes.