1. Describe the features of formal and informal organizations and bureaucracies.
    
2. Discuss issues that arise in contemporary organizations, including gendered and network organizations.
    
3. Contrast gemeinschaft and gesellschaft societies.
    
4. Describe global societies in terms of nations, states, and nation-states.

Summary

Much sociological work on organizations are based on Max Weber’s model of bureaucracy. However, one criticism of this model is that bureaucracies are not as highly rational as Weber believed. Their rationality is limited by the instabilities and conflicts that exist in organizations. McDonaldization has become an increasingly important model for organizations seeking to operate more rationally. This model is applicable both to large corporations and relatively small outlets that are crucial parts of these organizations and to organizations increasingly devoted to consumption rather than just production. Compared with classic bureaucracies, networks are less hierarchical, more open and flexible, and more capable of expansion and innovation. The next level of social organization on the micro–macro continuum is the society, a large population that lives in a given territory, has a social structure, and shares a culture. Talcott Parsons identified several structures particularly important to modern societies, including the economy, the political system, the systems responsible for transmitting culture and its norms and values, and the legal system. A key recent change is the shift from industrial to risk societies. A key structure in global analysis is the nation-state, which combines the organizational structure of the state and a population that defines itself as a nation of people with shared characteristics. However, the nation-state as a form of social organization is under siege because of global flows over which it has little control—e.g., flows of information, economic phenomena, and new social movements. Consequently, sociologists are coming to focus more on the global domain, the process of globalization, and in particular the global flows that best define globalization. Manuel Castells, for instance, argues that globalization has brought a change from spaces of places to spaces of flows. Arjun Appadurai focuses on five different types of global landscapes or scapes. There are also limits to global flows, mainly created by macro-level entities like nation-states and labor unions.