In this edition of the organizational zoo series, we take a closer look at an interesting organization design case-GitHub, a software company from California. Similar to Valve, the subject of the previous article in the series (Puranam and Håkonsson, J Organ Design 4: 2-4, 2015) GitHub is used...

The bureaucratic organizational structure has been recently challenged by a number of organizations that claim to offer employee emancipation and autonomy through self-management, self-organizing, or "holacracy." To facilitate theorizing about such organizational-level self-management, I examine...

This paper combines theories of organizational design with theories of production to provide a novel perspective, which helps explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated "modern" corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I describe the...

The notion of organizational hierarchy is disputed, also in view of the rise of new organizational forms claimed to have "hierarchies without bosses." To better understand the contested nature of hierarchy, this essay provides a systemic perspective on organizational hierarchy defined as a...

Since the Industrial Revolution, management has relied on hierarchy to control assets and employees. The negative impact of that hierarchical control on employee performance has long been recognized, yet in spite of expert and scholarly attempts to solve these problems hierarchical control...