Organizational design is a normative science with the goal of prescribing how an organization should be structured in order to function effectively and efficiently. Organizational theory is a positive science that states our understanding about how the world operates and contrasts that under- standing with a view of how the world could possibly operate. It provides the theoretical underpinnings for organizational design. In this book, we attempt to construct an approach for diagnosing and designing organiza- tions built on a knowledge base of organizational theory. Organizational design is a young field that incorporates many concepts and approaches. In organizational design literature to date, there seems to have been only two ways of doing things in this field-either to be so general and so simple that the various interpretations do not yield practical design implications, or to be so detailed and specific that generalization to other situations is almost impossible. We attempt here to strike a balance-and offer an approach that is applicable to a broad range of situations. In our view, organizational theory exists as a large body of related languages, definitions, hypotheses, analyses, and conclusions. Our know- ledge is vast, diverse, somewhat inconsistent, and generally unconnected. Yet there is an underlying core of knowledge that can be used for analytical purposes. Creating this balanced approach requirs that the knowledge be distilled and augmented to produce a set of clear and consistent design rules that can be used to recommend what the organiza- tion’s design should be.
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