Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1

Introduction

Organization design, as opposed to organization theory, is a prescriptive body of knowledge. It is intended to inform the choices of how to organize and manage institutions and serve the leaders who have been entrusted with the stewardship of these institutions. These organizations are purposeful: they have been created to accomplish specific goals and objectives. Organization design is therefore focused on creating organizations through which these goals and objectives can be accomplished.

The knowledge base underlying the choice of organization designs has its roots in scientific management and classical management principles. The practitioners and scholars who developed the knowledge in these areas were searching for ...