Multi-Perspective Approach to Understanding Organization Essay

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a multi-perspective approach to understanding organization? In answering the question you will need to engage with the nature of the various perspectives and how they enable and limit our understanding of organization. There are different ways in how people produce different knowledge and thus many people have come out with their own concepts and theories. This results in multiple perspectives that help to generate idea about different organization and organizing. The more knowledge of multiple perspectives, concepts and theories, the greater will be your capacity to choose a better approach with regards to the problems faced in your current company. Multi perspective is created as belief, assumptions and knowledge of the world influence how researchers carry out their research and manage their organization. What you do is to assume which approach does best for your industries and organization and for that you design and amend accordingly to be the best way to of optimizing man power and profit. The benefits of a multi-perspective approach would be (cited from page 11) multiple perspectives will also help organization embrace complexity and uncertainty and their contradictory demands. Managers and employees now are expected to do more with less, to maximize both short term gain and long term investment, and be more efficient as well as more humane and ethical. By confronting such a variety of contradictory forces demands the broadest set of concept and theories that your mind can grasp. Secondly, people raised question about the nature of ethical action and manager’s face when trying to act in socially and organization responsible ways. The advantages of using multiple perspective helps people aware of the assumption and values underlying your theory and practices, which in turn should make you more conscious of your reason for doing things and better able to understand the reason behind the action taken by others. Being able to reflect on your own reasoning process a nd compare them you will develop ethical awareness. Thirdly, if you learn about multiple perspective, you will be able to understand how different perspectives influence the way you and others experience by interpreting and shape organization realities. You will become a more effective member of any organization to join. Let me evaluate with the two important philosophical choices of ontology and epistemology. Ontology concerns our assumtion about reality which you don’t question whether all this things are real or have an existence undependent because of you (cited from pg12) pjilosphers sometimes refers to these as existential question because they attribute existence to one set of things(reality) but not to another (unreal). Which means that you carry out task upon your own perspective only, while you disregard other perspective. The disadvantages will be it will lead to arguments between those who maintain different perspectives and cause them to set up seperate and conflicting mates. This is a major concerns as people have been always living in their own world and never care of other people’s feeling which causes conflict around their organization and families. People experience different things as what they do everyday or even their personalities are different from other peoople we call this term subjectivist. Whereas Objectivist is different, theybelieve that what reality exist independently of those who lives in it, people also reacted to what is happening around them in predictable ways because their behaviour is part of the material world in which they live is determined by causes (cited from page 12). Example, if you are hoping to own a european car and the behaviour in which you have to work hard to pay for it is determined by wanting to own the car. Epistemology whereas is concerned with knowing how you can know. Epistemology is closely related to ontology because the anwsers to there questions depend on and help to forge assumptions about the nature of reality. This two terms determined the three major multiple perspective approach to understanding organisation. Usually the three multiple perspectives can be comparable using these two variables ontology and epistemology. Modernism is usually objectivism, you must limit commit to limiting what you count as knowledge to what you can know through your five senses. Results can be taken again if steps of the procedure is followed again using the five senses and the respective sense-enhancing devices. Modernist organization theorist also believes that if they can get whole of the complete knowledge by understanding how and why organisations function the way they do and how their function is influence by different environment conditions. Therefore to get a modernist perspective effective organisation is to being able to balace internal and external pressures, develop core competencies, increase efficiency and versertile to changes. The theories that influence modernist are general system theory, socio-technical systems theory and contingency theory. General system theory is to understand and grasp the concept of system and it characteristics of the company, which it can also mutually interrelated into parts called subsystem for easier understanding of each process. By using differentiation it provides the system with the benefits of specialization. To put into simpler terms a organisation if want to use the general system theory, that means that they will divide the units and departments and each department with the benefits of specialization. For socio-technical theory, they focus on a number of humanistic issues, by treating organisation as a social system, the social and psychological consequence of work design, the importance of the work group compared to the individual and the need for a division of labour that considers increasing rather than decreasing the variety of work skills and task. Socio-technical theory also suggest that self-managed teams should be the building blocks of organizational design and that could lessen the need for hierarchy form of organisation. Whereas for contingency theory, theorist will try to identify the key contingencies in each situation and try to determine the best fits between them, this theory have remain very popular among companies because they take seductive form of recipes for success.