Matthew Kraatz - Organizational diversity, pluralism, and integrity

Matthew Kraatz is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His work deals with organizational theory and change, particularly for complex large social organizations, such as research universities or hospitals or larger systems. He focuses on organizations up through governments with a "pluralism" that has to cope with many different stakeholders and missions, many of which seem to be in conflict with each other.

His article should be assigned reading at Eastern Michigan University, that just had a huge battle between the athletic and academic budgets. Kraatz deals with that exact issue.

His work should be of interest to my Baha'i readers, as he finds current research in Administrative Science that stresses organizational integrity, constancy of purpose, a need for a long-term over-arching goal or mission that can overcome parochial interests and silos, etc.

A chapter of the forthcoming textbook Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism is available for a while on-line here. The chapter is long, not an easy read, and has 15 pages of references, but his conclusions include these:

We think that these (somewhat) integrative metaphors are scientifically
tenable ones, based on the available data and the academic arguments we have
presented above.

Organizations do seem to hang together (however imperfectly), and the
centripetal forces that integrate them are no less scientific than the
centrifugal ones that tend to fragment.

... Cynicism ... may foreclose real opportunities for cooperative
change.

Thus, of all the real barriers to cooperation which clearly exist, we
suspect that a lack of belief in the very possibility of the thing itself may be
the most thoroughly devastating.

The words resonate the thought that dominates "Peace - More than an end to War" which I've been rereading lately. In addition, the integrative organization that he and Selznick believe may be possible in the future bears a striking resemblance to the Baha'i model of organization.

It's reassuring to see commerce and science converge on what religion has been suggesting for well over a century. We're making progress!