From the Design of Structures to the Designing of Organizations

Abstract

Abstract The chapter starts with a historical outline of organization design featuring the following trends: • Contingency and configuration • The Simonian design tradition • Institutional organization design • Cognitive, situated, and generative approaches • Systemic approaches from business economics. Next, the chapter turns to an analysis of future trends, based on three proposals. The first concerns the growth of design thinking, which although containing a host of proposals for organization design change, it is so far not seen as an organization designing trend. Second, the trend of managerial choice and action as the focus of organization design is brought back from classical organization theory but with a new twist, that is, the role of the manager is now split into three separate but integrated activities—strategizing, designing, and managing. Third, it is proposed that the turn in some management literature towards language and meaning would become the focus of managerial action under the new design-inspired paradigm.