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Organisational Morphology (OM), a component of organisational semiotics (OS), is reviewed in this section. OM proposes a method to model a business and assess its performance with focusing on the effects and functions of information. Although OM has weaknesses and needs to be developed further, it fills the gap between business performance measurement methods reviews and the need to assess the performance of information based activities in IIOs. Semiotics, organisational semiotics, the norm and norm-based activities and the organisational onion are reviewed respectively.Finally, the contents and function of organisational morphology are discussed in modelling an IIO and assessing its performance.
Semiotics is a well-established, widely applied discipline with a long history. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914) founded semiotics and Morris(1938) made it more generally familiar as a science of signs. Semiotics concerns the analysis of signs or the study of the functioning of sign systems(Liu, 2000).
Traditionally, the framework of semiotics has three parts, syntactic,semantics and pragmatics. Then, Stamper (1973) added three more parts,physical world, empirics and social world to the framework, as shown in Figure 2.12. Physical world studies the physical aspects of signs; empirics concerns the statistical properties of signs; syntactic discusses the structure of signs; semantics deals with the signs’ meanings; pragmatics focuses on the usage of signs, and the social world on the top argues the effect of the use of signs in human world. The upper three levels focus on the use of signs and the lower three levels concern the organisation of signs.
Figure 2.12 Semiotics Framework (Stamper, 1973)
Organisational semiotics is a branch of semiotics that applies semiotics to an organisational context (Stamper et al., 1994). Activities are used to model information in an organisation, particularly organisations related to business. Organisational semiotics treats an organisation as a sign system. It aims to find new and insightful ways of analysing, describing and explaining structure and behaviour of organisations (Liu, 2000). Organisational semiotics is based on the fundamental observation that all organisational behaviour is affected through communication and interpretation of signs by individuals and groups. From the organisational semiotics perspective, information can create value. Organisational semiotics focuses on the effective use of information to maximise the value added in a business through organisational activities. This means that“business can be done with words”(Liu, 2000).From the organisational semiotics perspective, business activities are those activities that manage information to create value. Hence, OS treats an organisation as an information system.
Stamper (1992) proposed the organisational onion to illustrate how to model a business as an information system. As shown in Figure 2.13, the organisational onion consists of three layers, technical, formal and informal systems. The organisation is treated as an informal information system in which oral culture plays the dominant role. In the formal layer, literature rules and disciplines form the bureaucratic system. In the technical layer,machine-based system automates some of the functions and procedures of the formal system layer.
Figure 2.13 The Organisational Onion (Stamper, 1992)
Therefore, an IIO could be modelled as an information system. In the semiotic framework, the analysis exists in the social layer where beliefs,expectations, commitments, contracts, law and culture dominate the whole system (Liu, 2000).
In the social layer of the semiotic framework, norms play the key role.Wright (1963) defines norm as regulation, rule and law. In a society, a norm has the “function of directing, coordinating and controlling actions”(Liu,2000). Wright (1963) also analyses the components of norms, including:(1) Character——the effect of a norm; (2) Content——activity prescribed;(3) Condition——the circumstance of norm applied; (4) Authority——the agent who gives and issues the norm; (5) The subject——the agent who applies the norm; (6) Occasion——location and span of a norm.
In a business, norms can be grouped to three categories: substantive norms, communication norms, and control norms (Liu, 2000). Substantive norms concern the key objectives of a business and contribute to the added value directly. Communication norms ensure agents in an organisation understand what information they need and provide to others.Communication norms keep the parts of the organisation coordinated to achieve its goals. Norms of control ensure that everyone in an organisation behaves in the same direction to achieve business objectives. They provide awards and punishment to reinforce agents through implementing substantive and communication norms. These three types of norms can overlap one another. A specific norm can be classified to two or three types of norms simultaneously.
Based on these three types of norms, organisational morphology is developed to model and assess an organisation. To model a business,organisational morphology focuses on the organisational functions rather than just the structure (Liu, 2000). The three types of norms build the whole business structure with this approach.
In the substantive area, functions are directly linked to the organisational objectives. The tasks are productivity-related. In the communication area, the functions focus on communication. Tasks inform the relevant people about relevant facts, work procedures, what actions are to be taken, when and by whom. These are required to coordinate the temporal and spatial use of resources for substantive activities. The control functions aim to assure that the whole business system runs properly, particularly the substantive and communication area. Tasks in this area include monitoring and evaluation of substantive and communication actions, followed by appropriate rewards and punishments imposed on the responsible agents.
Figure 2.14 shows that an organisation consists of three sub-areas: the substantive area X.S, communication or message-passing area X.M, and control area X.C. each of which can be further divided to provide more detail(Liu, 2000). All three areas are necessary to an organisation. The communication functions are required to inform people and coordinate actions. The control functions will ensure the other areas function properly.Stamper et al. (1994) propose the assumption that an unhealthy organisation has to consume a great deal of its energy in building elaborate communication subsystems and will have to rely largely on formal control subsystems. These two types of subsystems comprise large parts of typical bureaucratic infrastructures. On the other hand, in a well-performed business, resources and energy consumed by substantive activities outweigh the other two types.
According to Stamper’s discussion, substantive, communication and control activities are interlinked. Although communication and control activities do not contribute directly to adding value in business, they work together to assist the implementation of substantive activities. It means,communication activities are used to help people in organisation understand what value-adding activities to do, and control activities ensure they do it.
Adequate communication can improve the effectiveness in an organisation (King and Sethi, 1996), and the organisation is more autonomously operated with less monitoring from the superior management level (Mirchandani and Lederer, 2006). In the method of organisational morphology modelling, although communication and control activities work together to assist substantive activities, organisation is more effective with greater communication activities rather than control activities. Thus, in assessing the “health” of an organisation, communication and control activities are separated types of norm based activities in comparison with substantive activities.
Figure 2.14 Organisational Morphology (Stamper et al., 1994)
The main strength of the OM method is that, it can analyse the nature of information flows and treat information as a production factor. Information is the input and output of the organisation and the value is added by processing the information (Stamper et al., 1994; Baranauskas et al., 2002). OM splits each information-based activity to substantive, communication and control groups. This method focuses on the function of information flows.
Compare to previous methods introduced in this chapter, OM provides a distinctive perspective to model and assess the performance of IIOs. It offers a method to identify the information-based activities in an organisation.
However, as OM models the organisation by functions rather than process, the information flow is not clearly described. It is hard to identify the route of communication in the modelling process (Huang, 1998). Thus, it is difficult to identify norms or information based activities in the complex process of a business using OM.
Beside, OM lacks solutions to improve the performance. Currently, the solution is to increase or decrease substantive, communication and control activities to balance the weight among these three to achieve the healthy standard proposed by Stamper et al. (1994). However, in the current stage,this argument is still an assumption and needs to be proved. Quantitative criteria are also needed to show what the benchmark is for a “healthy”organisation.
According to the literature reviewed, current approaches can only partly meet the needs for modelling IIOs and assess their performance. There is still a gap between the research questions and existing methods.
Current approaches for modelling IIOs can be classified into three groups, the input-process-output model, process modelling methods and functional modelling methods. The IPO model defines the general information flow directions in an IIO and can construct the general structure of the organisation. However, IPO is short of necessary steps to identify specific information flows. It also cannot reflect the function of information,or answer why the information is needed. DFD in the process modelling methods can describe detailed data flows in IIOs clearly. But it has a high requirement on modeller that he or she should be very familiar with the business process from both general and specific view. Otherwise, data flows can be missed easily in the modelling process. Moreover, DFD also cannot reflect the function of information in IIOs. Functional modelling methods,including mathematics methods, and social network analysis, can demonstrate the effects of marketing activities in IIOs; however, they are not suitable to capture specific activities.
Thus, current modelling methods can be only partly used to model information based marketing activities in IIOs, and there is a need to develop a more comprehensive and practical approach to monitoring and data collection to assess the performance. Such an approach should be able to identify information based marketing activities comprehensively, based on the analysis of function of information in business processes.
There are many methods to measure marketing performance and eight popular approaches were reviewed. To assess information based marketing activities in IIOs, these methods have common shortages, including: (1) they cannot reflect the role of information in the measurement, and as such do not treat information as a key factor in the assessment; (2) they have not considered feedback from customers, i.e., customer needs is a critical factor in marketing and it should be a significant dimension in measuring marketing performance; (3) there is lack of systematic indicators for measurement, i.e.,most current methods are guidelines or principles, specific indicators in assessing are needed to practical use.
Besides the above reviewed approaches, organisational morphology provides a method to measure performance of an IIO based on norm based activities. This method can reflect the function of information, but short of specific approach to identify information-based activities in IIOs and the criteria for the “health”of an organisation.
Thus, a new method is needed to assess marketing performance in IIOs.The new approach should be able to focus on information in marketing process with systematic indicators.
The discussion above suggests that none of the methods reviewed in this chapter alone can achieve the task of modelling and assessing information based marketing in IIOs simultaneously. Moreover, a marketing and admission department in a Chinese university is a small organisation with limited professional knowledge. It is difficult for the marketing and admission staff to assess the performance in recruitment by applying various methods,and currently there is no single method that can be effectively applied in practical use in this field.
Thus, a new method is needed to fill the gap in both conceptual and practical aspects of the problem. The method to be developed should be more comprehensive and can answer the above research questions. Key functions of the new method should include: (1) an ability to identify information based activities without the risk of missing ones; (2) an ability to assess the outcome of information based activities; and (3) features that can be effectively applied in practical use. Based on the methods reviewed previously, the new method should integrate the strengths from various approaches and establish a single framework to model and assess information based marketing activities. As elaborated in Chapter 4, IPO can be used to describe the general structure of an IIO and provide the general targets for information based activities identification; the DFD approach can be used to identify specific information based activities; and OM can be developed to model and assess business performance by focusing on the function of information. Compared to existing approaches, the newly developed method is more comprehensive and could answer the questions in this research.