6.3 Formal Organizations

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

  • Distinguish the types of formal organizations
  • Recognize the characteristics of bureaucracies
  • Identify the impact of the McDonaldization of society

A complaint of modern life is that society is dominated by large and impersonal secondary organizations. From schools to businesses to healthcare to government, these organizations, referred to as formal organizations, are highly bureaucratized. Indeed, all formal organizations are, or likely will become, bureaucracies. We will discuss the purpose of formal organizations and the structure of their bureaucracies.

The content of this course has been taken from the free Sociology textbook by Openstax