Returning to the Frontier of Contingency Theory of Organizational and Institutional Designs

Abstract

Much has been learned, and even more needs to be learned, about designing organizations and institutions. Since the 1960s this research has evolved from contingency to configuration, to complementarity, to complexity and creative theories of organizing. This chapter reviews these evolving theories (better called perspectives) and urges scholars to return to the frontier of organization studies by addressing an important new agenda in designing organizations with promising new research methods.

Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate comments on earlier versions of this chapter from Michel Avital, Daved Barry, Gerry Davis, David Deephouse, Daniel Forbes, Ranjay Gulati, Paul Hirsch, Aseem Kaul, Rosabeth Kanter, Michael Loundsbury, Borge Obel, Willie Occasio, PK Toh, Gurneeta Singh, Anand Swaminathan, Michael Useem, and Richard Wang. They also received very helpful feedback from Royston Greenwood.

Notes

See organizational design community at http://orgdesigncomm.com/

In reference to Dooley and Van de Ven's (1999) model, N corresponds to the dimensionality of a system, and K refers to interdependence among these dimensions.

Heavy- and fat-tail distributions are distributions with tails that are not exponentially bounded and exhibit large skewness and kurtosis relative to normal distribution (Clauset et al., 2009).