Structural Conditions of Intraorganizational Power

Abstract

1 This research was carried out at the Faculty of Business Administration, University of Alberta, with the support of Canada Council Grants No. 67-0253 and No. 69-0714, and concluded at the Organizational Analysis Research Unit, University of Bradford, England, and the Industrial Administration Research Unit, The University of Aston in Birmingham, England. The strategic-contingencies theory of intraorganizational power proposed by Hickson et al. hypothesizes that the power of subunits results from contingent dependences among them created by unspecified combinations of coping with uncertainty, workflow centrality (immediacy and pervasiveness), and nonsubstitutability. This paper reports on methods devised to test this theory with alternative forms of data on seven organizations, or power systems, of four subunits each. The theory is refined by the exploration of different patterns of variables related to successive levels of power, and the tentative ordering of these variables in terms of their consequences for power.1