This paper describes a simple set of coordination structures that model certain kinds of information processing involved in organizations and markets. Four generic coordination structures are defined: product hierarchies, functional hierarchies, centralized markets, and decentralized markets....

This paper examines the contribution of supervisors to an organization's output by constructing a production function in which supervisors' time and case workers' time enter as inputs. There is a quality variable associated with output: average delay. The functional form of the production...

This paper is concerned with organizational information systems. Examples of such systems include intelligence systems, communications systems, management information systems, decision support systems, and administrative control systems. Systems such as these are critical to an organization's...

Most managers, when confronted with a difficult strategic decision, would like to know what is the prevailing practice in their industry. Prevailing practice interests managers, in part, because it may indicate which decisions are good, even "best." The rationale is "Darwinian economics," which...

The elements of organizational structuring---which show a curious tendency to appear in five's---suggest a typology of five basic configurations: Simple Structure, Machine Bureaucracy, Professional Bureaucracy, Divisionalized Form, and Adhocracy. The elements include (1) five basic parts of the...

The objective of this paper is to suggest some directions in the 1980s for the development of the theory and practice of planned change. The author makes two basic assumptions in approaching this objective. First, the two fields most widely associated with planned change, organization...

This paper considers the question: How should a firm allocate a resource among divisions when the productivity of the resource in each division is known only to the division manager? Obviously if the divisions (as represented by their managers) are indifferent among various allocations of the...

The literature on the deomposition of mathematical programs as models for organizational design and resource allocation in decentralized organizations is extensive. Although models differ in detail, all conceptualize the allocation problem as a multi-level managerial coordination procedure,...

The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of...

This paper describes the nature and design of post-industrial organizations. It begins with an assessment of the popular literature on post-industrial society, and finds that this literature is an inappropriate basis for inferring the nature of post-industrial organizations. Partly as a...