Technostructure is a concept that John Kenneth Galbraith introduced to organizational language, in his book The New Industrial State, to name the group of technicians, analysts and / or advisers who contribute specialized knowledge, talent or experience to the elaboration of business decisions.
On technostructure Galbraith pointed out (pp. 87, 88):
The head of the mercantile organization was identified in the past with the entrepreneur, the individual who united the ownership or control of capital with the ability to organize the other factors of production and, in most cases, with the ability as well. to innovate. With the formation of the modern company and the constitution of the organization required by modern technology and planning, with the separation of the owner from capital and control of the company, the entrepreneur has ceased to exist as an individual person in the mature industrial enterprise.
Everyone recognizes that except for the economics manuals. Outside of them, the entrepreneur as the directing force of the company is replaced by management, management. This is an imperfectly determined collective entity; in large companies it includes the president of the company and the board, the vice presidents who are responsible for an important team or a department, those who occupy other important positions in the teams and, in some cases, the heads of divisions and departments that have not been included in the previous list. The group therefore includes a very small part of the people who participate as informants in the decision-making groups.
The general decision-making group is, however, very large; It ranges from the most important officers of the company to the most extensive perimeter, to the employees and workers whose function is to work more or less outside the group, which therefore includes all those who contribute specialized knowledge, talent or experience to the decision making by the group.
This group is the intelligence that guides the company, the brain of the company; management is not. There is no name to designate that group of all those who participate in decision-making, or to indicate the organization they form. I propose to call that organization a technostructure.
Mintzberg (p.56) also referred to the concept like this:
We find in the technostructure the analysts (as well as their administrative staff) who serve the organization by affecting the work of others. These analysts can be cut out of the operations workflow - they might design it, plan it, change it, or train the people who do it but don't participate in it. Thus, the technostructure is only effective when it can resort to analytical techniques to make the work of others more effective.
What is the technostructure? It is made up of analysts who study adaptation, change in the organization depending on the evolution of the environment, and those who study the control, stabilization and normalization of activity patterns in the organization. In this work we pay more attention to the checklists, which focus their efforts directly on the design and operation of the structure. The analysts of control of the technostructure serve to consolidate the normalization in the organization. This is not to suggest that workers are not capable of normalizing their own work, in the same way that each establishes his own system for dressing in the morning; nor that managers cannot do it in their place, but, as a general rule,the more the organization resorts to standardization, the more it trusts its technostructure. Such standardization reduces the need for direct supervision, training administrative staff to deal with what the manager used to do.
We can distinguish three types of control analysts corresponding to three types of standardization: work study analysts (such as industrial engineers), who standardize work processes; planning and control analysts (such as long-term planners, budget analysts, and accountants), who standardize outputs, and personnel analysts (including preparers and hiring managers), who standardize skills.
In a fully developed organization, the technostructure can function at the entire hierarchical scale. At the lower levels of the manufacturing company, analysts normalize the operations workflow by scheduling production, conducting time and method studies on operator work, and putting in place quality control systems. At the intermediate levels, they try to normalize the intellectual work of the organization (preparing middle managers, for example) and carry out operations research studies on informational tasks. Acting in accordance with the strategic apex, they design strategic planning systems and develop financial systems to control the objectives of the main units.
While analysts exist to normalize the work of others, their own work seems to be coordinated with that of others, primarily through mutual adaptation (although standardization of skills also plays a role in this coordination, because analysts are often specialists with high-level training). Thus, analysts spend a lot of time on informal communication. Guetzkow, for example, indicates that staff members tend to have broader communication contacts than those belonging to the linear structure, and my summary of the literature on managerial work presented indications that staff managers paid more attention to information processing roles (monitor, broadcaster, spokesperson) than line managers.
Vidal (p.72) puts the technostructure in the following terms:
The shareholders are the owners. They are the owners, they are the ones who really own the company. But as such, one by one, they cannot decide on the fate of the company. The institutional crystallization of the company is in the Board of Directors as representation of the company council and in the manager as the manager. or the employee, of the board of directors to run the company. Therefore a sector arises, which is this vague sector of managers and bosses, which is the executive sector. Hence the everyday name of "executives." They are the decision makers. They make decisions about what to invest, how much to invest, where to invest, who to hire, open a branch, close a branch, change products. All decisions. Among other,whether or not profits are distributed. So they have enormous power. Well, this sector Galbraith has dubbed it the "technostructure."
Bibliography
- Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State, Princeton University Press, 2007 Mintzberg, Henry. The structuring of organizations, Editorial Ariel, 2012 Vidal Villa, José María. Lessons on capitalism and development, Edicions Universitat Barcelona, 2004
