The vertical, horizontal, external, and geographic boundaries of one firm are made permeable so information and ideas move freely across them.
What it is
A boundaryless organization keeps whatever grouping it has and works on the lines between the groups, making four kinds of boundary permeable: vertical, between levels; horizontal, between functions and units; external, between the firm and its suppliers, customers, and partners; and geographic, between places. Information, resources, and ideas are meant to move freely across all four. Authority stays in a hierarchy, but people from many levels are drawn into decisions. Coordination runs through open information flows, cross-boundary forums, and shared goals.
The boundaryless organization keeps its hierarchy and opens the lines between groups
Select a unit or the letter to read it; the shaded field is the firm, the partner stands outside it, and the dashed band is the middle line of managers, found only at the moderate end.
Reports toAdjust to each other directlyMMutual adjustmentThe firm; partners stand outside it
Select a unit or a letter to read it. M, mutual adjustment: People coordinate their own work by informal communication with each other.Top management. Layer: Top. Reports to no one. Authority stays in the hierarchy. People from many levels are drawn into decisions, and the top still makes them.Functional unit. Layer: Units. Reports to Top management. By function or by product. The form sets no basis of grouping of its own and works on the lines between whatever groups it finds; function and product, the two bases of a single-line hierarchy, are recorded as judgment. Its layers span flat to moderate, so a middle line of unit managers is found only at the moderate end.Product unit. Layer: Units. Reports to Top management. By function or by product. A unit that keeps its specialty while its boundaries with the other units, and with partners outside, are made permeable, so information, resources, and ideas move across them.Supplier, customer, partner. Layer: Units. Outside the firm. Across the external boundary, which the form makes permeable without handing its own work across it.Front-line team. Layer: Front line. Reports to Functional unit. Front-line people in the functional unit. Opening the vertical boundary draws them into decisions.Front-line team. Layer: Front line. Reports to Product unit. The product unit's front-line people, who meet their counterparts from other units across the horizontal boundary.Cross-boundary forum. Layer: Across the boundaries. Reports to Top management. Cross-functional teams and cross-boundary forums, such as GE's Work-Out town meetings, laid over the existing grouping to open the vertical and horizontal boundaries (Ulrich, Kerr, and Ashkenas 2002). The new boundaries they create still have to be managed (Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992).M, mutual adjustment. People coordinate their own work by informal communication with each other.
The structure in words
- Top
- Top management, reports to no one. Authority stays in the hierarchy. People from many levels are drawn into decisions, and the top still makes them.
- Units (Moderate end only)
- Functional unit, reports to Top management, grouped by function or by product. The form sets no basis of grouping of its own and works on the lines between whatever groups it finds; function and product, the two bases of a single-line hierarchy, are recorded as judgment. Its layers span flat to moderate, so a middle line of unit managers is found only at the moderate end.
- Product unit, reports to Top management, grouped by function or by product. A unit that keeps its specialty while its boundaries with the other units, and with partners outside, are made permeable, so information, resources, and ideas move across them.
- Supplier, customer, partner, outside the firm. Across the external boundary, which the form makes permeable without handing its own work across it.
- Front line
- Front-line team, reports to Functional unit. Front-line people in the functional unit. Opening the vertical boundary draws them into decisions.
- Front-line team, reports to Product unit. The product unit's front-line people, who meet their counterparts from other units across the horizontal boundary.
- Across the boundaries
- Cross-boundary forum, reports to Top management, coordinated by mutual adjustment. Cross-functional teams and cross-boundary forums, such as GE's Work-Out town meetings, laid over the existing grouping to open the vertical and horizontal boundaries (Ulrich, Kerr, and Ashkenas 2002). The new boundaries they create still have to be managed (Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992).
- Front-line team and Cross-boundary forum: adjust to each other directly.
- Front-line team and Cross-boundary forum: adjust to each other directly.
- Product unit and Supplier, customer, partner: adjust to each other directly.
The form keeps whatever grouping it finds and makes four boundaries permeable: between levels, between units, between the firm and its partners, and between places. People from many levels and units meet in cross-boundary forums and adjust to each other directly, while the top still decides.
Source: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992; Ulrich and colleagues 2002.
The founding book, Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, and Kerr (1995), is a practitioner work, and three profile levels rest on its theory: mutual adjustment as the prime coordinating mechanism; task forces and teams as the lateral mechanism, which Hirschhorn and Gilmore's (1992) practitioner article also supports; and permeable boundaries, the definition. The rest are our judgment, the form never having been measured: grouping spanning function and product, since the form sets no basis of its own; medium specialization; formalization spanning low to medium; mixed centralization; layers spanning flat to moderate; selective vertical and horizontal decentralization; moderate differentiation with some integration; and a mode of exchange spanning bureaucracy and clan (Ouchi 1980, a conceptual article).
The permeability level is contested: two case studies, each of one organization, put it at selective because boundaries held, at NASA (Lifshitz-Assaf 2018) and in a postbureaucratic firm (Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates 2006).
Where the boundaryless organization sits on the eleven dimensions
The filled segments are the form's levels; select a row for its reason and sources.
Select a dimension to read why the form sits there, and on what basis.Basis of grouping: Function or process and product or purpose. Basis: Judgment. The form sets no grouping basis of its own and lays its defining layer over whatever structure it finds; the two bases of a single-line hierarchy are recorded as judgment so a reader's profile can still match. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Specialization: Medium. Basis: Judgment. Specialties remain while their boundaries are opened; judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Standardization and formalization: Low to medium. Basis: Judgment. Making boundaries permeable means replacing concrete walls with permeable structures; judgment for the band. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Centralization: Mixed. Basis: Judgment. Opening the vertical boundary brings people from many levels into decisions while the top still decides; judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Layers and span of control: Flat to moderate. Basis: Judgment. The vertical boundary between levels is opened, which the source treats as permeability rather than removing levels; judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Decision rights and the locus of authority: Selective vertical and horizontal decentralization. Basis: Judgment. Decisions move to where ideas and information are, across levels and units; judgment for the type. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Mintzberg 1980.Prime coordinating mechanism: Mutual adjustment. Basis: Theory. Open information flows across boundaries let people adjust to each other directly. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Lateral mechanisms: Task forces and teams. Basis: Theory. Cross-functional teams and cross-boundary forums; as hierarchies give way to horizontal networks and teams, new boundaries still have to be managed. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992.Differentiation against integration: Moderate differentiation, some integrating roles. Basis: Judgment. Units keep their differences while people who cross boundaries carry ideas, resources, and competence between them; judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Mode of exchange and control: Bureaucracy and clan. Basis: Judgment. A hierarchy that leans on shared goals; judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Ouchi 1980.Boundary permeability: Permeable. Basis: Theory. Vertical, horizontal, external, and geographic boundaries are all made permeable, the form's definition. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Lifshitz-Assaf 2018; Kellogg and colleagues 2006. View 2: Selective. In the two field studies listed for the form, boundaries held: when NASA opened its research to outsiders, only professionals who did identity work dismantled their boundaries, and in a postbureaucratic firm cross-boundary practices did not eliminate jurisdictional conflicts. Sources: Lifshitz-Assaf 2018; Kellogg and colleagues 2006.
Three levels rest on the founding book's theory: mutual adjustment, task forces and teams, and permeable boundaries, the form's definition. The other eight are judgment, the form never having been measured. Permeability is contested: two case studies, at NASA and in a postbureaucratic firm, put it at selective because boundaries held.
Source: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Mintzberg 1980, a synthesis of earlier research, offering propositions without a new test; Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992; Ouchi 1980, a conceptual article; Lifshitz-Assaf 2018, one longitudinal case study; Kellogg and colleagues 2006, one case study.
Where it came from
Jack Welch began using the theme of a boundaryless organization at General Electric in 1990. Ron Ashkenas, Dave Ulrich, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr set it out as a form in The Boundaryless Organization (1995). The problem it answered was how a large, layered firm can gain speed, flexibility, and integration without dissolving its structure.
The schools of organization design and the forms' origins, 1900 to now
Each row is a school's era; each square under them is a form at its first year. Select a row or a square to read it; on a form's page, its own square and span are marked, with the schools that treat it.
The forms by first year
Schools that treat this form: Resource dependence and the new-forms debate.
Select a school's row or a form's square to read it.Select a form's square to read it; open a school below.Bureaucracy and its critics1900s to 1950s, revived from the 1990sWhat it claimsWeber held that rational-legal authority exercised through an office hierarchy, written rules, trained officials, and promotion by qualification is technically superior in precision, speed, and reliability. Critics studied its unintended consequences, Michels's iron law sharpest.What it has shownMerton (1940) argued, with no test, that rules can turn from means into ends; case studies followed. The Aston group concluded that the type's dimensions vary independently, and Wagner's meta-analysis (2021) found that many of their interrelationships have weakened.Who disputes itHuman relations and System 4 sets the costs of impersonal rules to motivation and cooperation against the technical superiority Weber stresses.Bureaucracy and its critics in The Schools of Organization DesignClassical administration1910s to 1940s, and in German to the 1970sWhat it claimsThere are general principles of administration, among them division of work, unity of command, a scalar chain of authority, and a limited span of control, and a structure built to them will be efficient in most settings. Taylor added that planners should set work methods.What it has shownThe school offered reasoning and experience, not tests. Woodward (1965) found that the spans and levels of the more successful firms in her sample differed by production system, and Simon (1946) showed that the principles come in pairs that point in opposite directions.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory found that the structure of successful firms varies with technology and environment, where classical writers treat their principles as general.Classical administration in The Schools of Organization DesignHuman relations and System 41920s to 1960sWhat it claimsOutput depends on the social relations of work, the norms of informal groups, and the style of supervision as much as on formal design. Likert's System 4, overlapping work groups joined by linking-pin managers under participative management, outperforms authoritative systems.What it has shownThe founding evidence is the Hawthorne studies, which later reanalyses dispute (Carey 1967; Levitt and List 2011). Likert's support came largely from his own institute's surveys. Wagner (1994) found participation's effects on performance and satisfaction significant but small.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads human relations as a technique of managerial control rather than a change in the distribution of power.Human relations and System 4 in The Schools of Organization DesignTransaction cost economics and the M-form hypothesis1937, then the 1970s to the presentWhat it claimsFirms exist, and are organized as they are, to economize on transaction costs. Hierarchy replaces the market when assets are specific, uncertainty is high, and exchange is frequent, and the multidivisional form should outperform the functional form in large, diversified firms.What it has shownArmour and Teece (1978) found, in United States petroleum firms from 1955 to 1973, a positive relationship between the multidivisional form and profitability while the form was spreading, but not once an equilibrium in organizational form was reached.Who disputes itThe network perspective on organizations: Granovetter argued that the theory undersocializes economic action, which is embedded in networks of personal relations that also produce trust and order.Transaction cost economics and the M-form hypothesis in The Schools of Organization DesignThe Carnegie school and the attention-based view1940s to the presentWhat it claimsPeople in organizations are boundedly rational, so structure matters because it sets the premises of their decisions and channels their attention: who sees which problems, which goals they pursue, and which routines they follow. Ocasio makes structure distribute attention.What it has shownMarch and Simon (1958) drew propositions from the existing literature, and Cyert and March (1963) added process models and simulations. Two studies show hierarchy shaping what is sent up as well as what is chosen (Reitzig and Maciejovsky 2015; Keum and See 2017).Who disputes itOrganizational economics: decision rights, authority, and complementarities models a principal and agents with defined objectives; the Carnegie school, firms as coalitions with unresolved goal conflict.The Carnegie school and the attention-based view in The Schools of Organization DesignSocio-technical systems1950s to 1980sWhat it claimsAn organization is a social system and a technical system that must be designed together. The same technology admits more than one way of organizing work, and groups that own a whole task and control its variances at the source perform better and are more satisfied.What it has shownTrist and Bamforth (1951) found that longwall mechanization broke up self-regulating work groups. A review of 134 experiments found them extremely successful overall, and Stewart (2006) linked team autonomy to performance; studies of socialist brigades and Volkswagen qualify it.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory: Kelly argued that labor intensification, not joint optimization, accounts for what socio-technical redesign achieved, and that the part of pay incentives was seriously underestimated.Socio-technical systems in The Schools of Organization DesignThe economics of the labor-managed firm and of enterprise ownership1958 to the presentWhat it claimsA firm run by its workers behaves differently from one run for investors: Ward modeled the Yugoslav-style firm as maximizing income per worker. Hansmann argued that an ownership form's success depends on the balance between the costs of market contracting and of ownership.What it has shownBurdín (2014) found a 29 percent lower hazard of dissolution for Uruguayan worker-managed firms than for conventional ones, and Fakhfakh, Pérotin, and Gago (2012) found French labor-managed firms as productive or more so in every industry studied.Who disputes itOrganizational economics (Jensen and Meckling) contrasts the labor-managed firm, in which tradable residual claims are legally prohibited, with cooperatives and partnerships that arise out of voluntary contracting.The economics of the labor-managed firm and of enterprise ownership in The Schools of Organization DesignModularity and the mirroring hypothesis1960s to the presentWhat it claimsComplex systems are built of nearly decomposable parts, and an organization's structure tends to mirror the architecture of what it makes: modular products allow loosely coupled organizations, and tightly coupled products need tightly coupled teams. Conway's law runs in reverse.What it has shownColfer and Baldwin (2016) review the empirical studies and report both support and principled exceptions. Direct tests point both ways: MacCormack, Baldwin, and Rusnak (2012) found open source products more modular than their commercial pairs; dynamic components break the mirror.Who disputes itNo school in the record disputes it head on; it answers information processing, which meets the coordination load inside the organization; mirroring writers locate it in the product's architecture.Modularity and the mirroring hypothesis in The Schools of Organization DesignStrategy and structure1960s to 1980sWhat it claimsStructure follows strategy: firms that diversify by product or geography outgrow the centralized functional structure and, after a lag and usually a crisis, adopt divisions. Chandler drew this from the histories of DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears.What it has shownChandler (1962) is comparative business history of four firms set against a wider survey. Rumelt (1974) related diversification and structure to performance, and Egelhoff (1988), with 34 multinationals, found some of Stopford and Wells's relationships supported and others not.Who disputes itInstitutional theory: in Fligstein's model divisions spread with a product-related or unrelated strategy, presidents from sales or finance, and other firms in the industry changing; strategy was one of three.Strategy and structure in The Schools of Organization DesignStructural contingency theory1960s to the presentWhat it claimsThere is no one best structure. Performance depends on fit between structure and contingencies such as environment, technology, size, and strategy, on an open-system view of the organization. Drazin and Van de Ven separate fit as selection, interaction, and systems.What it has shownBurns and Stalker, Woodward, and the Aston group related structure to context; Drazin and Van de Ven (1985) supported selection and systems fit only. Pennings (1975) found that fit did not explain effectiveness; Schoonhoven (1981) found traditional hypotheses unsupported.Who disputes itStrategic choice: Child argued that contingency theory explains structure by the constraints of context and leaves out the political process by which power-holders choose strategic action, structural forms included.Structural contingency theory in The Schools of Organization DesignThe French bureaucratic school (strategic analysis)1960s to 1980sWhat it claimsA bureaucracy is a system of power relations organized around zones of uncertainty. Impersonal rules and centralization protect members from depending on one another, those who control uncertainties hold power, and, unable to correct its errors, it changes only through crisis.What it has shownLe phénomène bureaucratique (1963; English 1964) rests on two case studies, a clerical agency and a state industrial monopoly. L'acteur et le système (1977; English 1980) is theoretical.Who disputes itSocietal effect and comparative business systems: D'Iribarne argues that national logics of conduct, such as a French logic of honor, explain differences that Crozier attributed to power games.The French bureaucratic school (strategic analysis) in The Schools of Organization DesignThe Japanese-firm literature1960s to the presentWhat it claimsThe large Japanese firm coordinates operating decisions through horizontal information sharing among semi-autonomous shops and uses its ranking hierarchy mainly as an incentive scheme (Aoki). It creates knowledge through middle-up-down management (Nonaka and Takeuchi).What it has shownAoki (1986) is a formal model. Lincoln, Hanada, and McBride (1986) compared 51 Japanese and 55 United States manufacturing plants, and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) rest on case studies, chiefly of Japanese firms. Fruin (1994) found the enterprise system defined at three levels.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads shop-floor delegation as control: Sewell and Wilkinson argue that just-in-time and total quality regimes delegate tactical responsibility while centralizing strategic control.The Japanese-firm literature in The Schools of Organization DesignThe Scandinavian and Dutch socio-technical schools1960s to 2000sWhat it claimsThe Scandinavian program sought democracy at work through field experiments with semi-autonomous groups, then through democratic dialogue. The Dutch school's design theory turns complex organizations with simple jobs into simple organizations with complex jobs.What it has shownEmery and Thorsrud reported field experiments in Norwegian industry; Gustavsen (1992) records that they spread less than hoped, his reason for turning to dialogue. Berggren studied work organization in the Swedish auto industry. The Dutch work rests on design cases and argument.Who disputes itThe Japanese-firm literature: defenders of the Toyota system hold that standardized work with employee participation learns faster; Berggren reports Swedish long-cycle plants matching a line plant on productivity.The Scandinavian and Dutch socio-technical schools in The Schools of Organization DesignConfiguration theory1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructures cluster into a small number of internally coherent configurations whose elements reinforce one another, so organizations move between a few types in large jumps, not small steps. Mintzberg's five configurations each rest on one coordinating mechanism.What it has shownDoty, Glick, and Huber (1993) found that fit to Miles and Snow's ideal types predicted effectiveness while fit to Mintzberg's did not. A meta-analysis of 40 tests (Ketchen and colleagues 1997) found that configuration partly explains performance, more so with broad definitions.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Donaldson counters that most organizations sit at intermediate points on a continuum of fits, not in a few configurations, and that studies over time find mostly incremental change.Configuration theory in The Schools of Organization DesignInformation processing1970s to the presentWhat it claimsThe more uncertain the task, the more information must be processed during its execution. An organization either reduces that need, through slack resources or self-contained tasks, or raises its capacity, through vertical information systems or lateral relations up to the matrix.What it has shownGalbraith (1973, 1974) built the framework from cases and from Simon's theory of bounded rationality, and Tushman and Nadler (1978) set it out as an integrating concept for design. Daft and Lengel (1986) argued that structure must reduce equivocality as well as supply data.Who disputes itThe Carnegie school and the attention-based view: Ocasio holds that firm behavior results from how the firm channels and distributes attention, so structure governs where attention goes, not only how much is processed.Information processing in The Schools of Organization DesignLabor process and critical theory1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructure is above all a system of control over labor. Braverman argued that management deskills work by separating conception from execution; Edwards traced a sequence from simple control by the boss to technical control through machines to bureaucratic control through rules.What it has shownHistorical and theoretical (Braverman 1974; Edwards 1979). Delbridge (1995), observing a Japanese-owned plant in England, found that just-in-time and total quality regimes combined the control of labor with management's economic goals more completely than piece rates had.Who disputes itBureaucracy and its critics: Adler argues that labor process theory ignores the progressive socialization of the labor process, which drives long-term skill upgrading, and disputes deskilling as the trend.Labor process and critical theory in The Schools of Organization DesignStrategic choice1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructure is the outcome of choices by those with power in the organization, who decide on strategic action, including the structural form, the manipulation of environmental features, and the performance standards to be met. Context constrains but does not determine structure.What it has shownLargely conceptual: Child (1972) built the argument from gaps in contingency findings, and the empirical case rests mostly on the modest share of structural variance contingencies explain. A 2026 review of 42 studies finds upper echelons theory their main theoretical anchor.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Donaldson replies that organizations mostly adopt the structures their contingencies dictate, to avoid the loss of performance misfit brings, so choice over structure is at most limited.Strategic choice in The Schools of Organization DesignThe German codetermination literature1970s to the presentWhat it claimsWorks councils and employee board seats form a structural layer through which coordination can become negotiation between management and employees. Defenders argue that it supports long-term employment, training, and cooperation; critics, that it weakens shareholder control.What it has shownJäger, Schoefer, and Heining (2021) found board-level codetermination left wages unchanged and, if anything, raised capital formation. Jirjahn (2011) reports studies pointing to positive works council effects; a meta-analysis found codetermination laws tied to lower productivity.Who disputes itOrganizational economics (Gorton and Schmid) found that firms with equal employee and shareholder representation did worse for their shareholders than firms with one-third employee representation.The German codetermination literature in The Schools of Organization DesignOrganizational economics: decision rights, authority, and complementarities1976 to the presentWhat it claimsDesign is the joint choice of who holds which decision rights, how performance is measured, and how it is rewarded. Rights should be placed where the specific knowledge lies, formal authority differs from real authority, and practices are complements that pay off in clusters.What it has shownIchniowski, Shaw, and Prennushi (1997) found, on 36 steel finishing lines, that lines using a set of innovative work practices achieved substantially higher productivity, consistent with complementarities. Bloom and colleagues found more decentralization where trust was higher.Who disputes itGhoshal argued that management research has shaped managers' worldview with ideologically inspired amoral theories, built on a scientific model that excludes human intentionality and so denies moral considerations.Organizational economics: decision rights, authority, and complementarities in The Schools of Organization DesignInstitutional theory1977 to the presentWhat it claimsFormal structures are often adopted because they are legitimate in the organization's field, as rationalized myths, and then decoupled from the work done. Organizations in a field grow alike through coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism, whether or not it is efficient.What it has shownTolbert and Zucker (1983) found that city characteristics predicted early but not later adoption of civil service reform, which they read as institutionalization. Palmer, Jennings, and Zhou (1993) found support for institutional and economic accounts of late M-form adoption.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Kraatz and Zajac found little support for neoinstitutional predictions in 631 liberal arts colleges, which grew less alike; the change they studied was curricular, not structural.Institutional theory in The Schools of Organization DesignPopulation ecology1977 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations face strong structural inertia, because selection favors the reliability and accountability of stable structures. Change in a population's forms comes mainly from founding and failure, not adaptation, and changing core features resets the liability of newness.What it has shownAmburgey, Kelly, and Barnett (1993) found that the effects of change on the hazard of failure vary by type of change and over time, and that rates of change depend on how often and how recently an organization has changed. Carroll and Hannan (2000) set out the program's methods.Who disputes itFor structural contingency theory, Donaldson argues that ecology understates managers' capacity to adapt structure.Population ecology in The Schools of Organization DesignResource dependence1978 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations depend on outside parties for critical resources, and structure follows the management of that dependence: units that cope with critical dependencies gain power, and boundaries are redrawn through cooptation, joint ventures, and mergers to absorb constraint.What it has shownPfeffer and Salancik (1978) assembled studies of boards, mergers, and joint ventures. A meta-analysis of 157 tests (Drees and Heugens 2013) corroborated the main prediction: organizations meet resource dependencies with interorganizational arrangements that raise their autonomy.Who disputes itTransaction cost economics and the M-form hypothesis explains boundaries by efficiency; resource dependence, by power and constraint.Resource dependence in The Schools of Organization DesignThe business-groups literature1978 to the presentWhat it claimsGroups of legally independent firms bound by ownership and social ties are a durable form of their own, neither one firm nor a market. Where institutions function poorly, groups can benefit member firms and can destroy value; they are sometimes paragons, sometimes parasites.What it has shownKhanna and Palepu (2000) found that affiliates of the most diversified Indian groups outperformed unaffiliated firms. A meta-analysis of 141 studies (Carney and colleagues 2011) found that affiliation lowers performance in general, less so where institutions are underdeveloped.Who disputes itOrganizational economics: agency writers read pyramids and cross-holdings as devices that separate control from ownership; Almeida and Wolfenzon offer a financing rationale for pyramids instead.The business-groups literature in The Schools of Organization DesignScandinavian institutionalism1980s to the presentWhat it claimsIdeas of organizing do not diffuse unchanged; they travel and are translated as they are adopted, so a form taken up in one place is not the same form elsewhere. Organizations can also be built of organizations (meta-organizations), which behave differently.What it has shownA discussion paper by Czarniawska and Joerges (1995) contrasts the diffusion of ideas with their translation, drawing on examples such as Swedish municipal reform; the work on meta-organizations (Ahrne and Brunsson 2008) is conceptual.Who disputes itInstitutional theory can read the same processes, seen from a translocal view, as institutional isomorphism, though translation holds that each adopter modifies an idea, so an institution re-created elsewhere is new.Scandinavian institutionalism in The Schools of Organization DesignSocietal effect and comparative business systems1980s to the presentWhat it claimsFirms matched on size, technology, and industry differ systematically by country, because how a society educates, trains, recruits, and promotes its workforce, and its industrial relations, shape how work is divided and supervised, so structure is partly a national product.What it has shownMaurice, Sorge, and Warner (1980) compared closely matched manufacturing units in France, West Germany, and Great Britain and found more pervasive differences in their organization than usually recognized. Whitley (1999) set out a comparative account of business systems.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory stresses culture-free elements of structure; matched comparisons find nationally different shapes of organization.Societal effect and comparative business systems in The Schools of Organization DesignThe network perspective on organizations1985 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations and their members are nodes joined by ties, and the pattern of ties shapes what they can do. Economic action is embedded in networks of personal relations (Granovetter 1985), and network forms are a distinct form, not a hybrid of market and hierarchy (Powell 1990).What it has shownPodolny and Page (1998) review the research and find that network forms foster learning, confer status and legitimacy, bring economic benefits, help manage resource dependencies, and give employees considerable autonomy, and they ask for attention to networks' dysfunctions.Who disputes itTransaction cost economics: Williamson treats the hybrid as a third generic form between market and hierarchy; for Powell, network forms are a distinct form, not a mix of the two.The network perspective on organizations in The Schools of Organization DesignComputational organization design and search1990s to the presentWhat it claimsDesign choices interact, so design space is a rugged landscape with many local peaks, and structure affects how well an organization searches it. Decentralizing interdependent decisions can trap units on poor peaks; temporary decentralization, then reintegration, can help.What it has shownMostly simulation, with one field test: Csaszar (2012), with more than 150,000 stock-picking decisions by 609 mutual funds, found that decision-making structure affects the number of initiatives pursued and the omission and commission errors made.Who disputes itNo school in the record disputes it head on; it disputes structural contingency theory, whose bivariate fit, its simulations show, cannot capture how the best design depends on interactions among choices.Computational organization design and search in The Schools of Organization DesignThe new-forms debate1990s to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations must solve four universal problems (dividing tasks, allocating them, providing rewards, and providing information), and a form is new when it solves them in new ways. Self-managing organizations radically decentralize authority; skeptics hold hierarchy reappears.What it has shownFoss (2003) traced the rise and partial reversal of Oticon's spaghetti organization to the problem of selective intervention. A meta-analysis of 54 studies of 13,914 teams (Greer and colleagues 2018) found that hierarchy within teams on net slightly lowers team performance.Who disputes itBureaucracy and its critics: removing formal structure leaves informal elites whose power is unaccountable (Freeman), and democratic and network organizations are much less hierarchy-free than their labels suggest.The new-forms debate in The Schools of Organization DesignThe algorithmic-management literature2015 to the presentWhat it claimsSoftware does much of the directing, evaluating, and disciplining that managers and rules once did. Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin (2020) call algorithmic control a new contested terrain; Puranam (2021) treats dividing decisions between people and machines as a design problem.What it has shownMostly qualitative field studies of gig work. Wood and colleagues (2019), with 107 interviews in six countries and 679 survey respondents, found that algorithmic management tends to give remote gig workers flexibility and autonomy, but also low pay, isolation, and overwork.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads control at work as contested terrain; Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin take up that view but argue that algorithmic control is distinct from earlier forms.The algorithmic-management literature in The Schools of Organization DesignFunctional structureOrigin: 1911 to 1937.Family: Classical hierarchies.Line and staffOrigin: 1916 to 1943.Family: Classical hierarchies.Multidivisional (M-form) by productOrigin: 1920s practice; named and analyzed 1962 to 1975.Family: Divisionalized forms.Machine bureaucracyOrigin: 1922 (Weber); 1979 (Mintzberg).Family: Classical hierarchies.Divisional by customer or market segmentOrigin: 1937; 2005.Family: Divisionalized forms.Matrix organizationOrigin: 1950s to 1960s practice; analyzed 1971 to 1977.Family: Lateral and multidimensional forms.Co-determined organizationOrigin: 1951 to 1976 (the laws); 1984 to 2022 (the main studies).Family: Forms from other traditions.Socio-technical autonomous work groupsOrigin: 1951 to 1965.Family: Team-based and self-managing forms.Stratified hierarchy (requisite organization)Origin: 1951 to 1989.Family: Classical hierarchies.Cooperative organizationOrigin: 1958 to 1999.Family: Forms from other traditions.Linking-pin organization (System 4)Origin: 1961 to 1967.Family: Team-based and self-managing forms.Divisional by regionOrigin: 1962 to 1972.Family: Divisionalized forms.Adhocracy (innovative organization)Origin: 1968 to 1979.Family: Professional, project, and knowledge forms.J-form (the Japanese firm)Origin: 1968 to 1990.Family: Forms from other traditions.Professional bureaucracyOrigin: 1968 to 1979.Family: Professional, project, and knowledge forms.Holding company (H-form)Origin: 1972 to 1975; 1987.Family: Divisionalized forms.Ambidextrous organizationOrigin: 1976 to 2004.Family: Professional, project, and knowledge forms.Simple structureOrigin: 1979.Family: Classical hierarchies.Hybrid structureOrigin: 1980 to the present.Family: Lateral and multidimensional forms.Missionary (ideological) organizationOrigin: 1980 to 1989.Family: Ideological forms.Network, modular, and virtual organizationOrigin: 1986 to 1990.Family: Network and market-like forms.Transnational and multidimensional organizationOrigin: 1987 to 1989.Family: Lateral and multidimensional forms.Business group (keiretsu, chaebol, family house)Origin: 1988 to 2007.Family: Forms from other traditions.Shamrock organizationOrigin: 1988 to 1989.Family: Network and market-like forms.Federal organizationOrigin: 1989 to 1992.Family: Network and market-like forms.Self-managing organization (less-hierarchical forms)Origin: 1989 to 2017.Family: Team-based and self-managing forms.Boundaryless organizationOrigin: 1990 to 1995.Family: Network and market-like forms.Front-back organizationOrigin: 1990s to 2007.Family: Lateral and multidimensional forms.Professional partnership (P2 form)Origin: 1990.Family: Professional, project, and knowledge forms.The corporate center and shared servicesOrigin: 1991 to 2000.Family: Divisionalized forms.Internal market organizationOrigin: 1993 to 1994.Family: Network and market-like forms.Process (horizontal) organizationOrigin: 1993 to 1999.Family: Lateral and multidimensional forms.Cellular organizationOrigin: 1994 to 1997.Family: Network and market-like forms.Hypertext organizationOrigin: 1994 to 1995.Family: Forms from other traditions.Team-based organizationOrigin: 1995.Family: Team-based and self-managing forms.Project-based organizationOrigin: 2000 to 2006.Family: Professional, project, and knowledge forms.Agile at scaleOrigin: 2001 to 2016.Family: Contemporary and emerging forms.Distributed (all-remote) organizationOrigin: 2002 to 2021.Family: Contemporary and emerging forms.Open-source and community-based organizationOrigin: 2002 to 2007.Family: Contemporary and emerging forms.Algorithmically managed organizationOrigin: 2015 to 2020.Family: Contemporary and emerging forms.Team of teamsOrigin: 2015.Family: Team-based and self-managing forms.
The schools by first year
- Bureaucracy and its critics1900s to 1950s, revived from the 1990sWhat it claimsWeber held that rational-legal authority exercised through an office hierarchy, written rules, trained officials, and promotion by qualification is technically superior in precision, speed, and reliability. Critics studied its unintended consequences, Michels's iron law sharpest.What it has shownMerton (1940) argued, with no test, that rules can turn from means into ends; case studies followed. The Aston group concluded that the type's dimensions vary independently, and Wagner's meta-analysis (2021) found that many of their interrelationships have weakened.Who disputes itHuman relations and System 4 sets the costs of impersonal rules to motivation and cooperation against the technical superiority Weber stresses.
- Classical administration1910s to 1940s, and in German to the 1970sWhat it claimsThere are general principles of administration, among them division of work, unity of command, a scalar chain of authority, and a limited span of control, and a structure built to them will be efficient in most settings. Taylor added that planners should set work methods.What it has shownThe school offered reasoning and experience, not tests. Woodward (1965) found that the spans and levels of the more successful firms in her sample differed by production system, and Simon (1946) showed that the principles come in pairs that point in opposite directions.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory found that the structure of successful firms varies with technology and environment, where classical writers treat their principles as general.
- Human relations and System 41920s to 1960sWhat it claimsOutput depends on the social relations of work, the norms of informal groups, and the style of supervision as much as on formal design. Likert's System 4, overlapping work groups joined by linking-pin managers under participative management, outperforms authoritative systems.What it has shownThe founding evidence is the Hawthorne studies, which later reanalyses dispute (Carey 1967; Levitt and List 2011). Likert's support came largely from his own institute's surveys. Wagner (1994) found participation's effects on performance and satisfaction significant but small.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads human relations as a technique of managerial control rather than a change in the distribution of power.
- Transaction cost economics and the M-form hypothesis1937, then the 1970s to the presentWhat it claimsFirms exist, and are organized as they are, to economize on transaction costs. Hierarchy replaces the market when assets are specific, uncertainty is high, and exchange is frequent, and the multidivisional form should outperform the functional form in large, diversified firms.What it has shownArmour and Teece (1978) found, in United States petroleum firms from 1955 to 1973, a positive relationship between the multidivisional form and profitability while the form was spreading, but not once an equilibrium in organizational form was reached.Who disputes itThe network perspective on organizations: Granovetter argued that the theory undersocializes economic action, which is embedded in networks of personal relations that also produce trust and order.
- The Carnegie school and the attention-based view1940s to the presentWhat it claimsPeople in organizations are boundedly rational, so structure matters because it sets the premises of their decisions and channels their attention: who sees which problems, which goals they pursue, and which routines they follow. Ocasio makes structure distribute attention.What it has shownMarch and Simon (1958) drew propositions from the existing literature, and Cyert and March (1963) added process models and simulations. Two studies show hierarchy shaping what is sent up as well as what is chosen (Reitzig and Maciejovsky 2015; Keum and See 2017).Who disputes itOrganizational economics: decision rights, authority, and complementarities models a principal and agents with defined objectives; the Carnegie school, firms as coalitions with unresolved goal conflict.
- Socio-technical systems1950s to 1980sWhat it claimsAn organization is a social system and a technical system that must be designed together. The same technology admits more than one way of organizing work, and groups that own a whole task and control its variances at the source perform better and are more satisfied.What it has shownTrist and Bamforth (1951) found that longwall mechanization broke up self-regulating work groups. A review of 134 experiments found them extremely successful overall, and Stewart (2006) linked team autonomy to performance; studies of socialist brigades and Volkswagen qualify it.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory: Kelly argued that labor intensification, not joint optimization, accounts for what socio-technical redesign achieved, and that the part of pay incentives was seriously underestimated.
- The economics of the labor-managed firm and of enterprise ownership1958 to the presentWhat it claimsA firm run by its workers behaves differently from one run for investors: Ward modeled the Yugoslav-style firm as maximizing income per worker. Hansmann argued that an ownership form's success depends on the balance between the costs of market contracting and of ownership.What it has shownBurdín (2014) found a 29 percent lower hazard of dissolution for Uruguayan worker-managed firms than for conventional ones, and Fakhfakh, Pérotin, and Gago (2012) found French labor-managed firms as productive or more so in every industry studied.Who disputes itOrganizational economics (Jensen and Meckling) contrasts the labor-managed firm, in which tradable residual claims are legally prohibited, with cooperatives and partnerships that arise out of voluntary contracting.
- Modularity and the mirroring hypothesis1960s to the presentWhat it claimsComplex systems are built of nearly decomposable parts, and an organization's structure tends to mirror the architecture of what it makes: modular products allow loosely coupled organizations, and tightly coupled products need tightly coupled teams. Conway's law runs in reverse.What it has shownColfer and Baldwin (2016) review the empirical studies and report both support and principled exceptions. Direct tests point both ways: MacCormack, Baldwin, and Rusnak (2012) found open source products more modular than their commercial pairs; dynamic components break the mirror.Who disputes itNo school in the record disputes it head on; it answers information processing, which meets the coordination load inside the organization; mirroring writers locate it in the product's architecture.
- Strategy and structure1960s to 1980sWhat it claimsStructure follows strategy: firms that diversify by product or geography outgrow the centralized functional structure and, after a lag and usually a crisis, adopt divisions. Chandler drew this from the histories of DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears.What it has shownChandler (1962) is comparative business history of four firms set against a wider survey. Rumelt (1974) related diversification and structure to performance, and Egelhoff (1988), with 34 multinationals, found some of Stopford and Wells's relationships supported and others not.Who disputes itInstitutional theory: in Fligstein's model divisions spread with a product-related or unrelated strategy, presidents from sales or finance, and other firms in the industry changing; strategy was one of three.
- Structural contingency theory1960s to the presentWhat it claimsThere is no one best structure. Performance depends on fit between structure and contingencies such as environment, technology, size, and strategy, on an open-system view of the organization. Drazin and Van de Ven separate fit as selection, interaction, and systems.What it has shownBurns and Stalker, Woodward, and the Aston group related structure to context; Drazin and Van de Ven (1985) supported selection and systems fit only. Pennings (1975) found that fit did not explain effectiveness; Schoonhoven (1981) found traditional hypotheses unsupported.Who disputes itStrategic choice: Child argued that contingency theory explains structure by the constraints of context and leaves out the political process by which power-holders choose strategic action, structural forms included.
- The French bureaucratic school (strategic analysis)1960s to 1980sWhat it claimsA bureaucracy is a system of power relations organized around zones of uncertainty. Impersonal rules and centralization protect members from depending on one another, those who control uncertainties hold power, and, unable to correct its errors, it changes only through crisis.What it has shownLe phénomène bureaucratique (1963; English 1964) rests on two case studies, a clerical agency and a state industrial monopoly. L'acteur et le système (1977; English 1980) is theoretical.Who disputes itSocietal effect and comparative business systems: D'Iribarne argues that national logics of conduct, such as a French logic of honor, explain differences that Crozier attributed to power games.
- The Japanese-firm literature1960s to the presentWhat it claimsThe large Japanese firm coordinates operating decisions through horizontal information sharing among semi-autonomous shops and uses its ranking hierarchy mainly as an incentive scheme (Aoki). It creates knowledge through middle-up-down management (Nonaka and Takeuchi).What it has shownAoki (1986) is a formal model. Lincoln, Hanada, and McBride (1986) compared 51 Japanese and 55 United States manufacturing plants, and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) rest on case studies, chiefly of Japanese firms. Fruin (1994) found the enterprise system defined at three levels.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads shop-floor delegation as control: Sewell and Wilkinson argue that just-in-time and total quality regimes delegate tactical responsibility while centralizing strategic control.
- The Scandinavian and Dutch socio-technical schools1960s to 2000sWhat it claimsThe Scandinavian program sought democracy at work through field experiments with semi-autonomous groups, then through democratic dialogue. The Dutch school's design theory turns complex organizations with simple jobs into simple organizations with complex jobs.What it has shownEmery and Thorsrud reported field experiments in Norwegian industry; Gustavsen (1992) records that they spread less than hoped, his reason for turning to dialogue. Berggren studied work organization in the Swedish auto industry. The Dutch work rests on design cases and argument.Who disputes itThe Japanese-firm literature: defenders of the Toyota system hold that standardized work with employee participation learns faster; Berggren reports Swedish long-cycle plants matching a line plant on productivity.
- Configuration theory1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructures cluster into a small number of internally coherent configurations whose elements reinforce one another, so organizations move between a few types in large jumps, not small steps. Mintzberg's five configurations each rest on one coordinating mechanism.What it has shownDoty, Glick, and Huber (1993) found that fit to Miles and Snow's ideal types predicted effectiveness while fit to Mintzberg's did not. A meta-analysis of 40 tests (Ketchen and colleagues 1997) found that configuration partly explains performance, more so with broad definitions.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Donaldson counters that most organizations sit at intermediate points on a continuum of fits, not in a few configurations, and that studies over time find mostly incremental change.
- Information processing1970s to the presentWhat it claimsThe more uncertain the task, the more information must be processed during its execution. An organization either reduces that need, through slack resources or self-contained tasks, or raises its capacity, through vertical information systems or lateral relations up to the matrix.What it has shownGalbraith (1973, 1974) built the framework from cases and from Simon's theory of bounded rationality, and Tushman and Nadler (1978) set it out as an integrating concept for design. Daft and Lengel (1986) argued that structure must reduce equivocality as well as supply data.Who disputes itThe Carnegie school and the attention-based view: Ocasio holds that firm behavior results from how the firm channels and distributes attention, so structure governs where attention goes, not only how much is processed.
- Labor process and critical theory1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructure is above all a system of control over labor. Braverman argued that management deskills work by separating conception from execution; Edwards traced a sequence from simple control by the boss to technical control through machines to bureaucratic control through rules.What it has shownHistorical and theoretical (Braverman 1974; Edwards 1979). Delbridge (1995), observing a Japanese-owned plant in England, found that just-in-time and total quality regimes combined the control of labor with management's economic goals more completely than piece rates had.Who disputes itBureaucracy and its critics: Adler argues that labor process theory ignores the progressive socialization of the labor process, which drives long-term skill upgrading, and disputes deskilling as the trend.
- Strategic choice1970s to the presentWhat it claimsStructure is the outcome of choices by those with power in the organization, who decide on strategic action, including the structural form, the manipulation of environmental features, and the performance standards to be met. Context constrains but does not determine structure.What it has shownLargely conceptual: Child (1972) built the argument from gaps in contingency findings, and the empirical case rests mostly on the modest share of structural variance contingencies explain. A 2026 review of 42 studies finds upper echelons theory their main theoretical anchor.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Donaldson replies that organizations mostly adopt the structures their contingencies dictate, to avoid the loss of performance misfit brings, so choice over structure is at most limited.
- The German codetermination literature1970s to the presentWhat it claimsWorks councils and employee board seats form a structural layer through which coordination can become negotiation between management and employees. Defenders argue that it supports long-term employment, training, and cooperation; critics, that it weakens shareholder control.What it has shownJäger, Schoefer, and Heining (2021) found board-level codetermination left wages unchanged and, if anything, raised capital formation. Jirjahn (2011) reports studies pointing to positive works council effects; a meta-analysis found codetermination laws tied to lower productivity.Who disputes itOrganizational economics (Gorton and Schmid) found that firms with equal employee and shareholder representation did worse for their shareholders than firms with one-third employee representation.
- Organizational economics: decision rights, authority, and complementarities1976 to the presentWhat it claimsDesign is the joint choice of who holds which decision rights, how performance is measured, and how it is rewarded. Rights should be placed where the specific knowledge lies, formal authority differs from real authority, and practices are complements that pay off in clusters.What it has shownIchniowski, Shaw, and Prennushi (1997) found, on 36 steel finishing lines, that lines using a set of innovative work practices achieved substantially higher productivity, consistent with complementarities. Bloom and colleagues found more decentralization where trust was higher.Who disputes itGhoshal argued that management research has shaped managers' worldview with ideologically inspired amoral theories, built on a scientific model that excludes human intentionality and so denies moral considerations.
- Institutional theory1977 to the presentWhat it claimsFormal structures are often adopted because they are legitimate in the organization's field, as rationalized myths, and then decoupled from the work done. Organizations in a field grow alike through coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism, whether or not it is efficient.What it has shownTolbert and Zucker (1983) found that city characteristics predicted early but not later adoption of civil service reform, which they read as institutionalization. Palmer, Jennings, and Zhou (1993) found support for institutional and economic accounts of late M-form adoption.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory: Kraatz and Zajac found little support for neoinstitutional predictions in 631 liberal arts colleges, which grew less alike; the change they studied was curricular, not structural.
- Population ecology1977 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations face strong structural inertia, because selection favors the reliability and accountability of stable structures. Change in a population's forms comes mainly from founding and failure, not adaptation, and changing core features resets the liability of newness.What it has shownAmburgey, Kelly, and Barnett (1993) found that the effects of change on the hazard of failure vary by type of change and over time, and that rates of change depend on how often and how recently an organization has changed. Carroll and Hannan (2000) set out the program's methods.Who disputes itFor structural contingency theory, Donaldson argues that ecology understates managers' capacity to adapt structure.
- Resource dependence1978 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations depend on outside parties for critical resources, and structure follows the management of that dependence: units that cope with critical dependencies gain power, and boundaries are redrawn through cooptation, joint ventures, and mergers to absorb constraint.What it has shownPfeffer and Salancik (1978) assembled studies of boards, mergers, and joint ventures. A meta-analysis of 157 tests (Drees and Heugens 2013) corroborated the main prediction: organizations meet resource dependencies with interorganizational arrangements that raise their autonomy.Who disputes itTransaction cost economics and the M-form hypothesis explains boundaries by efficiency; resource dependence, by power and constraint.
- The business-groups literature1978 to the presentWhat it claimsGroups of legally independent firms bound by ownership and social ties are a durable form of their own, neither one firm nor a market. Where institutions function poorly, groups can benefit member firms and can destroy value; they are sometimes paragons, sometimes parasites.What it has shownKhanna and Palepu (2000) found that affiliates of the most diversified Indian groups outperformed unaffiliated firms. A meta-analysis of 141 studies (Carney and colleagues 2011) found that affiliation lowers performance in general, less so where institutions are underdeveloped.Who disputes itOrganizational economics: agency writers read pyramids and cross-holdings as devices that separate control from ownership; Almeida and Wolfenzon offer a financing rationale for pyramids instead.
- Scandinavian institutionalism1980s to the present
- Societal effect and comparative business systems1980s to the presentWhat it claimsFirms matched on size, technology, and industry differ systematically by country, because how a society educates, trains, recruits, and promotes its workforce, and its industrial relations, shape how work is divided and supervised, so structure is partly a national product.What it has shownMaurice, Sorge, and Warner (1980) compared closely matched manufacturing units in France, West Germany, and Great Britain and found more pervasive differences in their organization than usually recognized. Whitley (1999) set out a comparative account of business systems.Who disputes itStructural contingency theory stresses culture-free elements of structure; matched comparisons find nationally different shapes of organization.
- The network perspective on organizations1985 to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations and their members are nodes joined by ties, and the pattern of ties shapes what they can do. Economic action is embedded in networks of personal relations (Granovetter 1985), and network forms are a distinct form, not a hybrid of market and hierarchy (Powell 1990).What it has shownPodolny and Page (1998) review the research and find that network forms foster learning, confer status and legitimacy, bring economic benefits, help manage resource dependencies, and give employees considerable autonomy, and they ask for attention to networks' dysfunctions.Who disputes itTransaction cost economics: Williamson treats the hybrid as a third generic form between market and hierarchy; for Powell, network forms are a distinct form, not a mix of the two.
- Computational organization design and search1990s to the presentWhat it claimsDesign choices interact, so design space is a rugged landscape with many local peaks, and structure affects how well an organization searches it. Decentralizing interdependent decisions can trap units on poor peaks; temporary decentralization, then reintegration, can help.What it has shownMostly simulation, with one field test: Csaszar (2012), with more than 150,000 stock-picking decisions by 609 mutual funds, found that decision-making structure affects the number of initiatives pursued and the omission and commission errors made.Who disputes itNo school in the record disputes it head on; it disputes structural contingency theory, whose bivariate fit, its simulations show, cannot capture how the best design depends on interactions among choices.
- The new-forms debate1990s to the presentWhat it claimsOrganizations must solve four universal problems (dividing tasks, allocating them, providing rewards, and providing information), and a form is new when it solves them in new ways. Self-managing organizations radically decentralize authority; skeptics hold hierarchy reappears.What it has shownFoss (2003) traced the rise and partial reversal of Oticon's spaghetti organization to the problem of selective intervention. A meta-analysis of 54 studies of 13,914 teams (Greer and colleagues 2018) found that hierarchy within teams on net slightly lowers team performance.Who disputes itBureaucracy and its critics: removing formal structure leaves informal elites whose power is unaccountable (Freeman), and democratic and network organizations are much less hierarchy-free than their labels suggest.
- The algorithmic-management literature2015 to the presentWhat it claimsSoftware does much of the directing, evaluating, and disciplining that managers and rules once did. Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin (2020) call algorithmic control a new contested terrain; Puranam (2021) treats dividing decisions between people and machines as a design problem.What it has shownMostly qualitative field studies of gig work. Wood and colleagues (2019), with 107 interviews in six countries and 679 survey respondents, found that algorithmic management tends to give remote gig workers flexibility and autonomy, but also low pay, isolation, and overwork.Who disputes itLabor process and critical theory reads control at work as contested terrain; Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin take up that view but argue that algorithmic control is distinct from earlier forms.
The forms by first year
- Functional structure: 1911 to 1937
- Line and staff: 1916 to 1943
- Multidivisional (M-form) by product: 1920s practice; named and analyzed 1962 to 1975
- Machine bureaucracy: 1922 (Weber); 1979 (Mintzberg)
- Divisional by customer or market segment: 1937; 2005
- Matrix organization: 1950s to 1960s practice; analyzed 1971 to 1977
- Co-determined organization: 1951 to 1976 (the laws); 1984 to 2022 (the main studies)
- Socio-technical autonomous work groups: 1951 to 1965
- Stratified hierarchy (requisite organization): 1951 to 1989
- Cooperative organization: 1958 to 1999
- Linking-pin organization (System 4): 1961 to 1967
- Divisional by region: 1962 to 1972
- Adhocracy (innovative organization): 1968 to 1979
- J-form (the Japanese firm): 1968 to 1990
- Professional bureaucracy: 1968 to 1979
- Holding company (H-form): 1972 to 1975; 1987
- Ambidextrous organization: 1976 to 2004
- Simple structure: 1979
- Hybrid structure: 1980 to the present
- Missionary (ideological) organization: 1980 to 1989
- Network, modular, and virtual organization: 1986 to 1990
- Transnational and multidimensional organization: 1987 to 1989
- Business group (keiretsu, chaebol, family house): 1988 to 2007
- Shamrock organization: 1988 to 1989
- Federal organization: 1989 to 1992
- Self-managing organization (less-hierarchical forms): 1989 to 2017
- Boundaryless organization: 1990 to 1995
- Front-back organization: 1990s to 2007
- Professional partnership (P2 form): 1990
- The corporate center and shared services: 1991 to 2000
- Internal market organization: 1993 to 1994
- Process (horizontal) organization: 1993 to 1999
- Cellular organization: 1994 to 1997
- Hypertext organization: 1994 to 1995
- Team-based organization: 1995
- Project-based organization: 2000 to 2006
- Agile at scale: 2001 to 2016
- Distributed (all-remote) organization: 2002 to 2021
- Open-source and community-based organization: 2002 to 2007
- Algorithmically managed organization: 2015 to 2020
- Team of teams: 2015
Twenty-three of the 29 schools run to the present, and 16 of those began in the 1970s or later. The forms arrive in waves: 14 of the 41 first appear between 1985 and 1994.
Source: Fayol 1949; Weber 1978; Mayo 1933; Trist and Bamforth 1951, an interview-based field study in one industry; Burns and Stalker 1961, a field study of twenty firms; Mintzberg 1979; Child 1972a; Coase 1937; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Hannan and Freeman 1977; Galbraith 1973; Jensen and Meckling 1976; Crozier 1963; Emery and Thorsrud 1969; Yoshino 1968; Streeck 1984a; Kellogg and colleagues 2020, a review of earlier research through one theoretical lens, with no new data; Puranam and colleagues 2014, a conceptual argument; Chandler 1962, several independent case histories by a historian; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Simon 1946; Maurice and colleagues 1980, a comparison of matched factories in three countries; Levinthal 1997; Simon 1962; Braverman 1974; Hamilton and Biggart 1988, a comparison of three economies by scholars; Ward 1958; Czarniawska and Joerges 1995; Granovetter 1985.
The label was already in print. Devanna and Tichy (1990), a conceptual argument, wrote of "the boundaryless corporation": after the downsizing and restructuring of the 1980s, large organizations seek advantage by being faster than competitors at satisfying customers. Hirschhorn and Gilmore (1992) described companies replacing vertical hierarchies with horizontal networks, interfunctional teams, and alliances, with the boundaries that matter then in managers' and employees' minds.
Where it fits
No test of the form against any factor was found. Eleven cells are our judgment, one rests on theory, and one is contested. The explorer's framing follows Burton and Obel's (2004) model, whose rules are propositions.
The boundaryless organization against the twelve contingency factors
Each factor at its three levels, Fits, Partial, or Strain; select a row for its reason, sources, and grade.
Select a factor to read its reason, sources, basis, and grade.Size. Opening vertical, horizontal, and external boundaries is a remedy for a large, layered firm; a small firm has few walls to open. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Age. Boundaries harden as organizations age and add layers, which is what this form sets out to loosen. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Greiner 1972; Hannan and Freeman 1984; Amburgey and colleagues 1993. View 1: Young partial, Established fits, Old fits. Boundaries harden as organizations age and add layers, which is what this form sets out to loosen. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Greiner 1972. View 2: Young partial, Established fits, Old partial. Inertia rises with age, and attempts at reorganization raise death rates, so loosening the boundaries of an old organization is itself a hazard. Sources: Hannan and Freeman 1984.Environmental uncertainty (unpredictability, dynamism). Permeable boundaries let information and ideas move fast across units and partners, which pays when the environment shifts; cross-boundary work also brings rework and ambiguity. Basis: Theory. Grade: conceptual only, no empirical test. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Kellogg and colleagues 2006; Burton and Obel 2004; Pennings 1975.Environmental complexity. Permeable boundaries let information about many dissimilar factors reach whoever needs it; in a simple environment there is less to move. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Burton and Obel 2004; Pennings 1975.Munificence and hostility. In our judgment opening boundaries can speed the response to threat, but nothing read ties the design to munificence. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Devanna and Tichy 1990.Diversity of products and markets. Permeable boundaries pay most where units have practices worth sharing, as related businesses do. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Strategy type. Permeable boundaries carry ideas between levels, units, and partners, which in our judgment serves continual search; Burton and Obel's prospector has low centralization and formalization, which the form meets only in part. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Burton and Obel 2004.Technology and routineness. Permeable boundaries can sit on any underlying grouping, so routineness bears on that grouping rather than on making boundaries permeable. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Interdependence. Open information flows across units serve reciprocal work that cannot be confined within one unit, which Thompson groups inside units first and links by liaison only where it crosses them; units that only share resources gain little from them. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Thompson 1967.Knowledge intensity and professionalization. Permeable boundaries have been sought in firms at every training level, and no work read ties the form to training levels. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Lifshitz-Assaf 2018.Global integration pressure. Making geographic boundaries permeable, so that ideas and practices move across countries, is one of this form's four moves; moving practice across countries is what integration pressure asks for, while adapting within each country, the other pressure, is not something permeability provides by itself. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.Local responsiveness pressure. No work read ties boundary permeability to responsiveness to countries, so this factor gives no reason for or against. Basis: Judgment. Sources: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995.
Counting the one contested cell by its first view, the 36 settings read Fits at 11 and Partial at 25, with no strain. Eleven of the twelve cells rest on judgment.
Source: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Greiner 1972, a conceptual model with no systematic test; Hannan and Freeman 1984; Amburgey and colleagues 1993, a quantitative study of organizational change and failure rates; Kellogg and colleagues 2006, one case study; Burton and Obel 2004; Pennings 1975, a quantitative field test of the structural-contingency model; Devanna and Tichy 1990, a conceptual argument; Thompson 1967; Lifshitz-Assaf 2018, one longitudinal case study.
Your own situation against the boundaryless organization
Set any factor to outline its cell in the strip above; the lines under the switches give the counts, the form's place among the 41, and the misfit rules that fire.
Size
Age
Environmental uncertainty (unpredictability, dynamism)
Environmental complexity
Munificence and hostility
Diversity of products and markets
Strategy type
Technology and routineness
Interdependence
Knowledge intensity and professionalization
Global integration pressure
Local responsiveness pressure
Set: 0 of 12 factors. Fits on 0, Partial on 0, Strain on 0, Contested on 0.
Its place in the explorer's rankingEvery factor is on Any: all 41 forms tie, and the explorer lists them alphabetically.1st of 411st of 41, tied with one other1st of 41, tied with 0 othersSunk by a misfit rule: 1st of 41Sunk by a misfit rule: 1st of 41, tied with one otherSunk by a misfit rule: 1st of 41, tied with 0 others
- Flagged (its sources disagree): A defender without written standards. Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
- Flagged (its sources disagree): An analyzer whose stable core has no standards. Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Burton and Obel 2004; Mintzberg 1980.
- Flagged (its sources disagree): A large organization with few written rules. Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
- Flagged (its sources disagree): Routine work without written standards. Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Trist and colleagues 1963; Pasmore and colleagues 1982; Beekun 1989; against it, Hickson and colleagues 1969; against it, Child and Mansfield 1972.
- Flagged (its sources disagree): Few written rules in a stable environment. Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
Ranking rule: by count of Fits on the factors the reader has set, then fewest Strains, then alphabetical; a fired misfit rule that no source disputes sinks the form to the bottom when every level of the form's profile meets it, a disputed one, or one that meets the form only through one end of a spanned level, one view of a contested profile cell, or one part of a two-part form, is flagged on the row (with both views where it is disputed), and a misfit between two of the reader's own settings is shown once above the list; a contested cell counts only where its views agree at the reader's level, and otherwise shows as Contested; factors on "Any" count for nothing; with every factor on "Any" the list is alphabetical and says so.
Open these settings in the explorer
The misfit rules that can fire for this form
- A defender without written standards fires when Strategy type at Defender (exploitation): flagged (its sources disagree). Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
- An analyzer whose stable core has no standards fires when Strategy type at Analyzer (exploitation and exploration): flagged (its sources disagree). Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Burton and Obel 2004; Mintzberg 1980.
- A large organization with few written rules fires when Size at Large: flagged (its sources disagree). Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
- Routine work without written standards fires when Technology and routineness at Routine: flagged (its sources disagree). Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Trist and colleagues 1963; Pasmore and colleagues 1982; Beekun 1989; against it, Hickson and colleagues 1969; against it, Child and Mansfield 1972.
- Few written rules in a stable environment fires when Environmental uncertainty (unpredictability, dynamism) at Stable: flagged (its sources disagree). Disputed: Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Burton and Obel 2004; against it, Mintzberg 1980.
Of the 39 contingency misfit rules, five can fire for this form, all on few written rules, which meet its formalization at the low end. All five are disputed, so each would only flag the form; none would sink it.
Source: Burton and Obel 2004; Burton and colleagues 2020a.
- Size. Our judgment: partial small, fits medium and large. Opening boundaries is a remedy for a large, layered firm; a small firm has few walls to open.
- Age. Our judgment, contested. One view (Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Greiner 1972, a conceptual model with no systematic test): partial young, fits established and old, since boundaries harden as organizations age. Later work qualifies Greiner's stage model: DeSantola and Gulati (2017), a review of earlier research with no new data, find narratives of both enduring features and dramatic change, and DeSantola, Gulati, and Zhelyazkov (2023), a longitudinal quantitative study of thousands of young ventures, found divergent paths, not a uniform march. The other view (Hannan and Freeman 1984, a theoretical argument, ungraded here): partial old too, since inertia rises with age and attempts at reorganization raise death rates, so loosening an old organization's boundaries is itself a hazard; Amburgey, Kelly, and Barnett (1993), a quantitative study of organizational change and failure rates, found the effects of change on failure varying by type of change and over time. The ranking counts the cell only at young and established, where the views agree.
- Environmental uncertainty. Theory: partial stable, fits shifting and unpredictable. Permeable boundaries let information and ideas move freely across units and partners (Ashkenas and colleagues 1995), which pays when the environment shifts: Burton and Obel (2004) fit a flexible structure to turbulence. There is a cost too: in Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates's (2006, one case study) firm, cross-boundary work brought rework and ambiguity, a premise, since the firm did not vary uncertainty.
- Environmental complexity. Our judgment: partial simple and moderate, fits complex, on Burton and Obel's (2004) premise that complexity adds information-processing requirements.
- Munificence and hostility. Our judgment: partial throughout; nothing read ties the design to munificence.
- Diversity. Our judgment: partial single business, fits related, partial unrelated. Permeability pays most where units have practices worth sharing.
- Strategy. Our judgment: partial defender and analyzer, fits prospector, on Ashkenas and colleagues' argument; Burton and Obel's (2004) prospector has low centralization and formalization, which the form meets only in part.
- Technology. Our judgment: partial throughout; routineness bears on the underlying grouping, not on permeability.
- Interdependence. Our judgment: partial pooled and sequential, fits reciprocal, on Thompson's (1967) propositions, ungraded here: reciprocal work is grouped inside units first, and liaison links it where it crosses them.
- Knowledge intensity. Our judgment: partial throughout. Lifshitz-Assaf (2018, one longitudinal case study) bears on the high level only.
- Global integration. Our judgment: partial low and moderate, fits high. Moving practice across the geographic boundary is what integration pressure asks for, though the book argues no levels.
- Local responsiveness. Our judgment: partial throughout; no work read ties permeability to it.
Pennings (1975), a quantitative field test of the structural-contingency model, sets a limit: it found that the fit between environmental and structural variables did not explain effectiveness; Donaldson (2001) argues that this and like early failures came from methodological limitations.
What it does well
The strengths claimed, speed, flexibility, and integration, are claimed in practitioner books more than shown. Ashkenas and colleagues (1995) say that people who cross horizontal boundaries carry ideas, resources, information, and competence with them, and in their account GE Work-Out ran hundreds of town meetings with the potential to reduce unnecessary work.
One case study gives some ground. In Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates's (2006) firm, members of different communities made their work visible and legible to each other and revised and aligned it; the authors suggest these practices form a trading zone that supports adaptability, speed, and learning.
What it costs
The form's plain cost is time and attention. Forums, cross-unit teams, and open information flows have to be staffed and run, and Thompson (1967) ranks mutual adjustment the costliest way to coordinate.
In Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates's (2006) firm, the practices the authors suggest support speed often privileged speed over quality, suppressed difference, cost comprehension, and brought misinterpretation, ambiguity, rework, and temporal pressure.
Schreyögg and Sydow (2010, a conceptual essay) state the general limit: fluidity pushed to its conclusion would lose the essence of organizing, so flexibility has to be balanced against efficiency.
How it fails
These modes are our reading: no study in these records tests the form as a whole.
How the boundaryless organization fails, and the coordination failures behind it
The entry's failure modes at the left, each tied to the Coordination Failures patterns it names at the right; a pattern links its entry there.
How many ties the failure has. Highest: Turf fights survive the open doorsSpeed outruns shared understandingOutside knowledge arrives and is not usedThe new boundaries go unmanagedJurisdictional gap or overlapGrounding failureSiloed knowledgeDropped commitmentDiffused responsibility
Select a failure to read its place in the network.Turf fights survive the open doors. Degree 1Speed outruns shared understanding. Degree 1Outside knowledge arrives and is not used. Degree 1The new boundaries go unmanaged. Degree 2Jurisdictional gap or overlap. Degree 1Grounding failure. Degree 1Siloed knowledge. Degree 1Dropped commitment. Degree 1Diffused responsibility. Degree 1
| Failure | Degree |
|---|---|
| Turf fights survive the open doors | 1 |
| Speed outruns shared understanding | 1 |
| Outside knowledge arrives and is not used | 1 |
| The new boundaries go unmanaged | 2 |
| Jurisdictional gap or overlap | 1 |
| Grounding failure | 1 |
| Siloed knowledge | 1 |
| Dropped commitment | 1 |
| Diffused responsibility | 1 |
Four failure modes name five patterns, and one mode names two, the new boundaries going unmanaged: dropped commitment and diffused responsibility. No study in these records tests the form as a whole, so every tie is our reading.
Source: Kellogg and colleagues 2006, one case study; Lifshitz-Assaf 2018, one longitudinal case study; Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992.
Turf fights survive the open doors. In Kellogg and colleagues' (2006) trading zone, cross-boundary practices did not eliminate jurisdictional conflicts: authority claimed twice, a jurisdictional overlap.
Speed outruns shared understanding. The same study found loss of comprehension, misinterpretation, and ambiguity: people believe they share a meaning they do not, a grounding failure.
Outside knowledge arrives and is not used. At NASA, professionals who did no identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced (Lifshitz-Assaf 2018): siloed knowledge.
The new boundaries go unmanaged. Where no one handles the boundaries Hirschhorn and Gilmore (1992) say replace the old, a request crosses an opened line that no one accepts, a dropped commitment, or the joint result has no owner, diffused responsibility.
The misfit rules are Burton and Obel's (2004) propositions; Burton, Lauridsen, and Obel (2002), a quantitative study of 224 Danish small and medium-sized firms, tested an earlier version only as a set and found lower return on assets where misfits stood, with no further loss from added misfits. Each pairs one factor with one structure, the interaction form of fit, which Drazin and Van de Ven (1985), a quantitative study of 629 work units in two states' employment security agencies, found unsupported, and firms in perfect institutional fit slightly lost performance striving for contingency fit (Volberda and colleagues 2012, a survey of 3,259 respondents in 1,904 companies), so a firing rule does not show that a move would help. No rule names this form, but its formalization spans low to medium, so five rules on low formalization meet it at the low end. Because all five are disputed, they flag the form and do not sink it.
A large organization with few written rules, a size the fit table calls fits: in Mintzberg's (1980, a synthesis of earlier research, offering propositions without a new test) professional bureaucracy, skills standardized by long training coordinate large operating units with little formalization, and the 2002 test held no large firms. A defender without written standards, and few written rules in a stable environment: Mintzberg places little-formalized professional work in complex but stable environments, a stability the defender's narrow domain shares on our reading, and a Burton and Obel rule for a stable, simple, highly equivocal environment calls high formalization the misfit, where the stable rule is stated for low equivocality. An analyzer whose stable core has no standards: the proposition read names the analyzer that does not innovate, and the same book allows the innovating analyzer a simple configuration when small. Routine work without written standards: disputed by Trist and colleagues (1963, several field studies in one industry), for whom one technology admits more than one way of organizing, though Kelly (1978), a critical reanalysis of several published case studies, found the cases showed only one form, autonomous groups, superior; by self-regulating groups, in work routine on our reading (Pasmore and colleagues 1982, a review of 134 reported experiments, success as their reports state it; Beekun 1989, a meta-analysis of 17 studies); by the Aston reappraisal (Hickson, Pugh, and Pheysey 1969, a multi-organization comparative survey), in which technology bore only on the structure closest to the workflow; and by Child and Mansfield (1972, a multi-firm comparative study), who found size related to structure far more than technology. Mohr (1971, a quantitative field study of technology and structure) found no support for effectiveness resting on the consonance of technology and structure, though his structure was participation, not formalization, and Donaldson (2001) reports later studies of the job unpredictability Mohr studied finding positive evidence for contingency theory. Glisson (1978), a path analysis of 30 human service organizations, found routinization dependent on four structural variables, worker discretion the link, so a little-formalized unit's work may be less routine because of its structure.
Against the three Mintzberg views, Doty, Glick, and Huber (1993), a quantitative test across a sample of organizations, found no support for organizations being more effective as they resemble his types, though Ketchen and colleagues (1997), a meta-analysis of 40 tests, found configuration partly explains performance, and Krabberød (2015), ungraded here, argues the test has not been shown exhaustive.
What the research found
The studies read examine particular boundaries, and no study in this build's records tests the boundaryless organization as Ashkenas and colleagues define it. They are Devanna and Tichy (1990) and Mortensen and Haas (2018), conceptual arguments; Santos and Eisenhardt (2005), a conceptual review; Kellogg, Orlikowski, and Yates (2006), one case study; Santos and Eisenhardt (2009), several case studies by scholars; Schreyögg and Sydow (2010), a conceptual essay; Lifshitz-Assaf (2018), one longitudinal case study; and Langley and colleagues (2019), a review of the literature and the most recent.
A search of English-language journals from 2010 to 2026 found no study of the form; with nothing tested here, nothing has failed to replicate.
The sources disagree over what a boundary is. The founding book treats boundaries as barriers to open by design. Santos and Eisenhardt (2009) found successful entrepreneurs co-constructing them, with power as the boundary logic; Langley and colleagues (2019) see design as open-ended and continually becoming, which, on our reading, bears on the form; and both case studies found boundaries still holding. The resource dependence school explains boundaries by power and constraint (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978, ungraded here; Santos and Eisenhardt 2005), whereas transaction cost economics explains them by efficiency, and, against the contingency school, treats the environment as something to manage and change, not only fit. Drees and Heugens (2013), a meta-analysis of 157 tests, corroborated its main prediction: organizations answer resource dependencies with interlocks, alliances, joint ventures, and in-sourcing.
In the new-forms debate, Puranam, Alexy, and Reitzig (2014), a conceptual argument, argue that existing theory may explain new forms' elements, the opportunity for new theory lying in the bundles that co-occur. Skeptics hold that hierarchy reappears, because someone must still settle disputes and allocate resources: Foss (2003), one case study, interprets Oticon's move from its spaghetti organization to a more structured one as arguably caused by the difficulty of committing credibly not to intervene in delegated decisions; Diefenbach and Sillince (2011), a conceptual analysis, find network organizations much less hierarchy-free than their labels suggest. Adler and Borys (1996), a conceptual argument with no new test, answer claims that bureaucracy is obsolete: formalization can enable, not only constrain. Barker (1993), one ethnographic case study, found concertive control, built from team members' own value consensus, controlling them more completely than the bureaucracy it replaced.
The evidence ledger holds 8 studies filed under this form.
In practice: one published case
NASA, as Hila Lifshitz-Assaf (2018) describes it in Administrative Science Quarterly, one longitudinal case study.
NASA adopted an open, peer-production model of innovation that opened its research and development knowledge work to anyone who chose to contribute, challenging its professionals' disciplinary boundaries. For one year its Space Life Sciences Directorate ran the existing model and the open one side by side, posting 14 research and development problems from 11 units on three open innovation platforms, with awards.
The open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed and with unusually limited resources. The professionals reacted divergently: only those who did identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries and adopted outside knowledge; the others failed to incorporate the solutions the model produced. Of those problems, three were judged fully solved and six partially. Project managers among those who opened their boundaries built a tool for choosing the degree of openness at each project stage.
The source concluded that adopting open innovation without a change in the professionals' identity produced no real change in the research process. Professional identity work, it concluded, is critical to changing knowledge-work boundaries and to shifting the locus of innovation.
The case covers one organization, which opened the external boundary only, in a research program, not a whole firm's structure; the source does not use the term boundaryless. In this build a crowd asked for solutions is a channel of search across the boundary, not a form.
Source: Lifshitz-Assaf 2018. Dismantling knowledge boundaries at NASA: the critical role of professional identity in open innovation, Administrative Science Quarterly 63(4), 746 to 782; one longitudinal case study.
Variants and near relatives
GE Work-Out. General Electric's town-meeting process for removing unneeded work across boundaries, set out by Ulrich, Kerr, and Ashkenas (2002), a practitioner book by its designers. In our reading it is the form's instrument, not a separate structure: a forum over the existing grouping, opening the vertical and horizontal boundaries.
The Network, modular, and virtual organization is the nearest neighbor; internal networks aside, it moves activities out to other firms and coordinates them by contract and relationship. The boundaryless organization keeps the activities inside one firm and makes all four kinds of boundary permeable, the external one included, without handing work across it.
Near relatives: the Distributed (all-remote) organization removes the shared site; the Process (horizontal) organization makes the end-to-end process the primary unit, whereas this form sets no grouping; the Team-based organization builds the whole from teams, here one lateral mechanism; the Internal market organization joins units by prices; and in the Open-source and community-based organization anyone may contribute without joining, whereas here members and hierarchy stay.
The boundaryless organization beside its nearest neighbor, the network
Select a number to fill what it marks in both drawings; the list under them gives the dimensions on which the two profiles differ.
It keeps the activities inside one firm and makes all four kinds of boundary permeable, whereas the network form, internal networks aside, moves activities across the firm's boundary to other firms.
Boundaryless organization
Reports toAdjust to each other directlyMMutual adjustmentThe firm; partners stand outside it
Network, modular, and virtual organization
Contract or priced tradeAdjust to each other directlyMMutual adjustmentOStandardization of outputsThe firm; partners stand outside it
- The boundaryless firm keeps its units' work inside and opens a tie to a partner without handing work over; in the network, other firms do the design, making, and distribution under contract.
- Authority stays in the boundaryless firm's hierarchy, and its top still decides; in the network, no partner answers to the hub or broker, and each decides over its own link.
- Mutual adjustment in cross-boundary forums is the boundaryless firm's one prime mechanism; the network adds standardized outputs to its partners' direct adjustment.
Differs on 9 of 11 dimensions
- Basis of grouping Function or process and product or purpose; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Function or process
- Specialization Medium; Network, modular, and virtual organization: High
- Standardization and formalization Low to medium; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Medium
- Centralization Mixed; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Decentralized
- Layers and span of control Flat to moderate; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Flat
- Decision rights and the locus of authority Selective vertical and horizontal decentralization; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Limited vertical decentralization to selective vertical and horizontal decentralization
- Prime coordinating mechanism Mutual adjustment; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Mutual adjustment and standardization of outputs
- Lateral mechanisms Task forces and teams; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Direct contact and liaison roles
- Mode of exchange and control Bureaucracy and clan; Network, modular, and virtual organization: Market
Each makes the firm's boundary permeable. The boundaryless organization keeps its activities inside one firm and opens the lines between its groups, while the network moves activities across the boundary to other firms.
Source: Ashkenas and colleagues 1995; Ulrich and colleagues 2002; Miles and Snow 1986; Powell 1990.
Moving into or out of it
A move's sequence and costs are undocumented beyond practitioner accounts of Work-Out's town meetings at General Electric (Ashkenas and colleagues 1995): no study in these records reports a move into or out of the form as a whole.
At NASA, an opening without a change in professionals' identity produced no real change in research (Lifshitz-Assaf 2018). Hannan and Freeman (1984) argue that inertia rises with age and that attempts at reorganization raise death rates; Amburgey, Kelly, and Barnett (1993) found the effects of change on failure varying by type of change and over time.
Our judgment: the form lays permeability over the grouping it finds, so moving in or out needs no regrouping.
Change & Transformation sets out how to run a reorganization.
The thinking behind it
- Ron Ashkenas, Dave Ulrich, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr: the boundaryless organization (1995), the form itself, in a practitioner book.
- Larry Hirschhorn, with Thomas Gilmore: the new boundaries of the boundaryless company (1992), a practitioner article on why new boundaries replace the old.
- Filipe M. Santos and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt: four conceptions of boundaries (2005) and boundaries shaped by power (2009), on why a boundary may be drawn on purpose.
- Katherine C. Kellogg, with Orlikowski and Yates: trading zones (2006), what cross-boundary coordination gains and costs.
- Hila Lifshitz-Assaf: identity work and open boundaries (2018), why an opened boundary may go uncrossed.
- Georg Schreyögg, with Jörg Sydow: the dilemma of organizational fluidity (2010), the limit on opening everything.
- Ann Langley and colleagues: boundary work (2019), organizational design as open-ended and continually becoming.
- Richard M. Burton and Børge Obel: multi-contingency fit and misfit (2004), behind the fit cells and misfit rules.
- James D. Thompson: interdependence and coordination (1967), behind the fit to reciprocal work.
- Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman: structural inertia (1984), behind the contested age cell.
- William Ouchi: markets, bureaucracies, and clans (1980), the mode of exchange the profile spans.
Also called
Permeable organization. The sources also write of the boundaryless corporation (Devanna and Tichy 1990) and the "boundaryless" company (Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992).
Works cited
- Adler and Borys 1996. Two types of bureaucracy: enabling and coercive, Administrative Science Quarterly 41(1), from p. 61; a conceptual argument with no new test.
- Ahrne and Brunsson 2008. Meta-organizations, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
- Amburgey and colleagues 1993. Resetting the clock: the dynamics of organizational change and failure, Administrative Science Quarterly 38(1), from p. 51; a quantitative study of organizational change and failure rates.
- Aoki 1986. Horizontal vs. vertical information structure of the firm, American Economic Review 76(5), 971 to 983; a formal economic model.
- Armour and Teece 1978. Organizational structure and economic performance: a test of the multidivisional hypothesis, Bell Journal of Economics 9(1), 106 to 122; a multi-firm statistical study in one industry.
- Ashkenas and colleagues 1995. The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organizational Structure, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
- Barker 1993. Tightening the iron cage: concertive control in self-managing teams, Administrative Science Quarterly 38(3), 408 to 437; one ethnographic case study.
- Beekun 1989. Assessing the effectiveness of sociotechnical interventions: antidote or fad?, Human Relations 42(10), 877 to 897; a meta-analysis of 17 studies.
- Brandstätter and Graf-Vlachy 2026. Strategic leadership and organizational design: a review and research agenda, Journal of Organization Design 15(3), 165 to 210.
- Braverman 1974. Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, Monthly Review Press, New York; the linked publisher's page is the 1998 twenty-fifth anniversary edition.
- Burdín 2014. Are worker-managed firms more likely to fail than conventional enterprises? Evidence from Uruguay, ILR Review 67(1), 202 to 238; a survival study of many firms in one country.
- Burns and Stalker 1961. The Management of Innovation, Tavistock Publications, London (first edition 1961); the DOI is for the Oxford University Press revised edition of 1994; a field study of twenty firms.
- Burton and colleagues 2002. Return on assets loss from situational and contingency misfits, Management Science 48(11), 1461 to 1485; a quantitative study of 224 Danish small and medium-sized firms.
- Burton and colleagues 2020a. Organizational design: a step-by-step approach (fourth edition), Cambridge University Press.
- Burton and Obel 2004. Strategic organizational diagnosis and design: the dynamics of fit, Kluwer Academic Publishers (third edition).
- Carey 1967. The Hawthorne studies: a radical criticism, American Sociological Review 32(3), 403 to 416.
- Carney and colleagues 2011. Business group affiliation, performance, context, and strategy: a meta-analysis, Academy of Management Journal 54(3), 437 to 460; a meta-analysis of 141 studies in 28 countries.
- Carroll and Hannan 2000. The demography of corporations and industries, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
- Chandler 1962. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (xiv and 463 pages); several independent case histories by a historian.
- Child 1972a. Organizational structure, environment and performance: the role of strategic choice, Sociology 6(1), 1 to 22.
- Child and Mansfield 1972. Technology, size, and organization structure, Sociology 6(3), 369 to 393; a multi-firm comparative study.
- Coase 1937. The nature of the firm, Economica 4(16), 386 to 405 (November 1937).
- Colfer and Baldwin 2016. The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions, Industrial and Corporate Change 25(5), 709 to 738; a review of 142 empirical studies.
- Crozier 1963. Le phénomène bureaucratique: essai sur les tendances bureaucratiques des systèmes d'organisation modernes et sur leurs relations en France avec le système social et culturel, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 414 pages; English translation The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, University of Chicago Press and Tavistock, 1964 (Crozier 1964).
- Crozier 1964. The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; Tavistock, London; two case studies by a scholar.
- Crozier and Friedberg 1977. L'acteur et le système: les contraintes de l'action collective, Éditions du Seuil, Paris (Sociologie politique series); English translation Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action, University of Chicago Press, 1980 (Crozier and Friedberg 1980).
- Crozier and Friedberg 1980. Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London; translated by Arthur Goldhammer from L'acteur et le système (Seuil, 1977; Crozier and Friedberg 1977).
- Csaszar 2012. Organizational structure as a determinant of performance: evidence from mutual funds, Strategic Management Journal 33(6), 611 to 632; a large-sample quantitative study of 609 mutual funds.
- Cyert and March 1963. A behavioral theory of the firm, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
- Czarniawska and Joerges 1995. Travels of ideas: organizational change as translation, Discussion paper FS II 95-501, Forschungsschwerpunkt Technik, Arbeit, Umwelt, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Berlin (40 pages; a substantially revised version of the authors' essay 'Winds of organizational change' in Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 1994).
- Daft and Lengel 1986. Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design, Management Science 32(5), 554 to 571.
- Delbridge 1995. Surviving JIT: control and resistance in a Japanese transplant, Journal of Management Studies 32(6), 803 to 817; a participant-observation study of one plant.
- DeSantola and colleagues 2023. External interfaces or internal processes? Market positioning and divergent professionalization paths in young ventures, Organization Science 34(1), 1 to 23; a longitudinal quantitative study of thousands of young ventures.
- DeSantola and Gulati 2017. Scaling: organizing and growth in entrepreneurial ventures, Academy of Management Annals 11(2), 640 to 668; a review of earlier research, with no new data.
- Devanna and Tichy 1990. Creating the competitive organization of the 21st century: the boundaryless corporation, Human Resource Management 29(4), 455 to 471; a conceptual argument.
- Diefenbach and Sillince 2011. Formal and informal hierarchy in different types of organization, Organization Studies 32(11), 1515 to 1537; a conceptual analysis.
- Donaldson 2001. The contingency theory of organizations, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA (Foundations for Organizational Science).
- Doty and colleagues 1993. Fit, equifinality, and organizational effectiveness: a test of two configurational theories, Academy of Management Journal 36(6), 1196 to 1250; a quantitative test across a sample of organizations.
- Drazin and Van de Ven 1985. Alternative forms of fit in contingency theory, Administrative Science Quarterly 30(4), from p. 514; a quantitative study of 629 work units in two states' employment security agencies.
- Drees and Heugens 2013. Synthesizing and extending resource dependence theory: a meta-analysis, Journal of Management 39(6), 1666 to 1698; a meta-analysis of 157 tests.
- Edwards 1979. Contested terrain: the transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century, Basic Books.
- Egelhoff 1988. Strategy and structure in multinational corporations: a revision of the Stopford and Wells model, Strategic Management Journal 9(1), 1 to 14; a multi-firm study of multinationals.
- Emery and Thorsrud 1969. Form and Content in Industrial Democracy: Some Experiences from Norway and Other European Countries, Tavistock Publications, London; reissued by Routledge.
- Fakhfakh and colleagues 2012. Productivity, capital, and labor in labor-managed and conventional firms: an investigation on French data, ILR Review 65(4), 847 to 879; a study of large representative samples of French firms.
- Fayol 1949. General and Industrial Management, Translated by Constance Storrs, with a foreword by L. Urwick. Pitman, London.
- Foss 2003. Selective intervention and internal hybrids: interpreting and learning from the rise and decline of the Oticon spaghetti organization, Organization Science 14(3), 331 to 349; one case study.
- Fruin 1994. The Japanese Enterprise System: Competitive Strategies and Cooperative Structures, Clarendon Press, Oxford; first published 1992 (ISBN 0198283180, LCCN 91033285); the DOI is the 1994 edition (ISBN 0198288980), in Oxford Scholarship Online from 2003; a historical study of Japan's 200 leading industrial firms by one scholar.
- Galbraith 1973. Designing Complex Organizations, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
- Galbraith 1974. Organization design: an information processing view, Interfaces 4(3), 28 to 36.
- Glisson 1978. Dependence of Technological Routinization on Structural Variables in Human Service Organizations, Administrative Science Quarterly 23(3), from p. 383; a path analysis of 30 human service organizations.
- Granovetter 1985. Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness, American Journal of Sociology 91(3), 481 to 510.
- Greer and colleagues 2018. Why and when hierarchy impacts team effectiveness: a meta-analytic integration, Journal of Applied Psychology 103(6), 591 to 613; a meta-analysis of 54 studies.
- Greiner 1972. Evolution and revolution as organizations grow, Harvard Business Review, July to August 1972; reprinted in Family Business Review 10(4), 397 to 409, 1997; a conceptual model with no systematic test.
- Gustavsen 1992. Dialogue and Development: Theory of Communication, Action Research and the Restructuring of Working Life, Van Gorcum, Assen; Swedish Center for Working Life, Stockholm (viii and 127 pages).
- Hamilton and Biggart 1988. Market, culture, and authority: a comparative analysis of management and organization in the Far East, American Journal of Sociology 94 (supplement), S52 to S94; a comparison of three economies by scholars.
- Hannan and Freeman 1977. The population ecology of organizations, American Journal of Sociology 82(5), 929 to 964.
- Hannan and Freeman 1984. Structural inertia and organizational change, American Sociological Review 49(2), 149 to 164.
- Hickson and colleagues 1969. Operations technology and organization structure: an empirical reappraisal, Administrative Science Quarterly 14(3), from p. 378; a multi-organization comparative survey.
- Hirschhorn and Gilmore 1992. The new boundaries of the 'boundaryless' company, Harvard Business Review (May to June 1992).
- Ichniowski and colleagues 1997. The effects of human resource management practices on productivity: a study of steel finishing lines, American Economic Review 87(3), 291 to 313; a quantitative study of 36 steel finishing lines in 17 companies.
- Jäger and colleagues 2021. Labor in the boardroom, Quarterly Journal of Economics 136(2), 669 to 725; a natural experiment across many German firms.
- Jensen and Meckling 1976. Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure, Journal of Financial Economics 3(4), 305 to 360.
- Jirjahn 2011. Ökonomische Wirkungen der Mitbestimmung in Deutschland: ein Update, Schmollers Jahrbuch 131(1), 3 to 57 (in German); a review of many independent econometric studies.
- Kellogg and colleagues 2006. Life in the trading zone: structuring coordination across boundaries in postbureaucratic organizations, Organization Science 17(1), 22 to 44; one case study.
- Kellogg and colleagues 2020. Algorithms at work: the new contested terrain of control, Academy of Management Annals 14(1), 366 to 410; a review of earlier research through one theoretical lens, with no new data.
- Kelly 1978. A reappraisal of sociotechnical systems theory, Human Relations 31(12), 1069 to 1099; a critical reanalysis of several published case studies.
- Ketchen and colleagues 1997. Organizational configurations and performance: a meta-analysis, Academy of Management Journal 40(1), 223 to 240; a meta-analysis of 40 tests.
- Keum and See 2017. The influence of hierarchy on idea generation and selection in the innovation process, Organization Science 28(4), 653 to 669; a field study combined with an experiment.
- Khanna and Palepu 2000a. Is group affiliation profitable in emerging markets? An analysis of diversified Indian business groups, The Journal of Finance 55(2), 867 to 891; a statistical study of many firms in one country.
- Krabberød 2015. Standing on the shoulders of giants? Exploring consensus on the validity status of Mintzberg's configuration theory after a negative test, SAGE Open 5(4), article 2158244015611185.
- Langley and colleagues 2019. Boundary work among groups, occupations, and organizations: from cartography to process, Academy of Management Annals 13(2), 704 to 736; a review of the literature.
- Levinthal 1997. Adaptation on rugged landscapes, Management Science 43(7), 934 to 950.
- Levitt and List 2011. Was there really a Hawthorne effect at the Hawthorne plant? An analysis of the original illumination experiments, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3(1), 224 to 238; a reanalysis of one plant's original experimental data.
- Lifshitz-Assaf 2018. Dismantling knowledge boundaries at NASA: the critical role of professional identity in open innovation, Administrative Science Quarterly 63(4), 746 to 782; one longitudinal case study.
- Lincoln and colleagues 1986. Organizational structures in Japanese and U.S. manufacturing, Administrative Science Quarterly 31(3), 338 to 364; a survey of about a hundred plants in two countries.
- MacCormack and colleagues 2012. Exploring the duality between product and organizational architectures: a test of the "mirroring" hypothesis, Research Policy 41(8), 1309 to 1324; a matched comparison of five pairs of software products.
- March and Simon 1958. Organizations, Wiley, New York (262 pages; with the collaboration of Harold Guetzkow); second edition, Blackwell, 1993.
- Maurice and colleagues 1980. Societal differences in organizing manufacturing units: a comparison of France, West Germany, and Great Britain, Organization Studies 1(1), 59 to 86; a comparison of matched factories in three countries.
- Mayo 1933. The human problems of an industrial civilization, Macmillan; reissued by Routledge, 2004.
- Merton 1940. Bureaucratic structure and personality, Social Forces 18(4), 560 to 568; a conceptual essay with no test.
- Meyer and Rowan 1977. Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony, American Journal of Sociology 83(2), 340 to 363.
- Miles and Snow 1986. Organizations: new concepts for new forms, California Management Review 28(3), 62 to 73.
- Mintzberg 1979. The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
- Mintzberg 1980. Structure in 5's: a synthesis of the research on organization design, Management Science 26(3), 322 to 341; a synthesis of earlier research, offering propositions without a new test.
- Mohr 1971. Organizational Technology and Organizational Structure, Administrative Science Quarterly 16(4), 444-459; a quantitative field study of technology and structure.
- Mortensen and Haas 2018. Perspective: rethinking teams: from bounded membership to dynamic participation, Organization Science 29(2), 341 to 355; a conceptual argument.
- Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995. The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, Oxford University Press, New York; case studies of several Japanese firms by the theory's authors.
- Ouchi 1980. Markets, bureaucracies, and clans, Administrative Science Quarterly 25(1), 129 to 141; a conceptual article.
- Palmer and colleagues 1993. Late adoption of the multidivisional form by large U.S. corporations: institutional, political, and economic accounts, Administrative Science Quarterly 38(1), 100 to 131; a multi-firm statistical study of adoption.
- Pasmore and colleagues 1982. Sociotechnical systems: a North American reflection on empirical studies of the seventies, Human Relations 35(12), 1179 to 1204; a review of 134 reported experiments.
- Pennings 1975. The relevance of the structural-contingency model for organizational effectiveness, Administrative Science Quarterly 20(3), from p. 393 (September 1975); a quantitative field test of the structural-contingency model.
- Pfeffer and Salancik 1978. The external control of organizations: a resource dependence perspective, Harper and Row; reissued by Stanford University Press, 2003.
- Podolny and Page 1998. Network forms of organization, Annual Review of Sociology 24, 57 to 76.
- Powell 1990. Neither market nor hierarchy: network forms of organization, Research in Organizational Behavior 12, 295 to 336 (JAI Press).
- Puranam 2021. Human-AI collaborative decision-making as an organization design problem, Journal of Organization Design 10(2), 75 to 80.
- Puranam and colleagues 2014. What's "new" about new forms of organizing?, Academy of Management Review 39(2), 162 to 180; a conceptual argument.
- Reitzig and Maciejovsky 2015. Corporate hierarchy and vertical information flow inside the firm: a behavioral view, Strategic Management Journal 36(13), 1979 to 1999; a field study combined with experiments.
- Rumelt 1974. Strategy, Structure, and Economic Performance, Division of Research, Harvard Business School, Boston; a multi-firm study of large corporations.
- Santos and Eisenhardt 2005. Organizational boundaries and theories of organization, Organization Science 16(5), 491 to 508; a conceptual review.
- Santos and Eisenhardt 2009. Constructing markets and shaping boundaries: entrepreneurial power in nascent fields, Academy of Management Journal 52(4), 643 to 671; several case studies by scholars.
- Schoonhoven 1981. Problems with contingency theory: testing assumptions hidden within the language of contingency 'theory', Administrative Science Quarterly 26(3), 349 to 377; a quantitative study of hospital operating room suites.
- Schreyögg and Sydow 2010. Organizing for fluidity? Dilemmas of new organizational forms, Organization Science 21(6), 1251 to 1262 (Crossroads section); a conceptual essay.
- Simon 1946. The proverbs of administration, Public Administration Review 6(1), from page 53.
- Simon 1962. The architecture of complexity, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(6), 467 to 482 (12 December 1962).
- Stewart 2006. A meta-analytic review of relationships between team design features and team performance, Journal of Management 32(1), 29 to 55; a meta-analysis of 93 studies.
- Streeck 1984a. Industrial Relations in West Germany: A Case Study of the Car Industry, Heinemann, London; St. Martin's Press, New York (178 pages).
- Thompson 1967. Organizations in action: social science bases of administrative theory, McGraw-Hill; reissued by Routledge, 2017.
- Tolbert and Zucker 1983. Institutional sources of change in the formal structure of organizations: the diffusion of civil service reform, 1880 to 1935, Administrative Science Quarterly 28(1), from p. 22.
- Trist and Bamforth 1951. Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting, Human Relations 4(1), 3 to 38; an interview-based field study in one industry.
- Trist and colleagues 1963. Organizational Choice: Capabilities of Groups at the Coal Face under Changing Technologies, Tavistock Publications, London; reissued by Routledge, 2013; several field studies in one industry.
- Tushman and Nadler 1978. Information processing as an integrating concept in organizational design, Academy of Management Review 3(3), from p. 613.
- Ulrich and colleagues 2002. The GE Work-Out: How to Implement GE's Revolutionary Method for Busting Bureaucracy and Attacking Organizational Problems Fast, McGraw-Hill, New York, xxii and 326 pages.
- Volberda and colleagues 2012. Contingency Fit, Institutional Fit, and Firm Performance: A Metafit Approach to Organization-Environment Relationships, Organization Science 23(4), 1040-1054; a survey of 3,259 respondents in 1,904 companies.
- Wagner 1994. Participation's effects on performance and satisfaction: a reconsideration of research evidence, Academy of Management Review 19(2), 312 to 330; a meta-analytic reanalysis that compares eleven reviews.
- Wagner 2021. Dimensional research on organization structure: meta-analysis and conceptual redirection, Journal of Management & Organization 31(4), 1854 to 1871 (published online December 2021; issue of July 2025); a meta-analysis of 346 correlations from 155 published articles.
- Ward 1958. The firm in Illyria: market syndicalism, American Economic Review 48(4) (1958); reprinted in David F. Heathfield (ed.), The Economics of Co-Determination, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, 1 to 25.
- Weber 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. University of California Press, Berkeley.
- Whitley 1999. Divergent capitalisms: the social structuring and change of business systems, Oxford University Press.
- Wood and colleagues 2019. Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy, Work, Employment and Society 33(1), 56 to 75; interviews in six countries and a survey of 679 workers.
- Woodward 1965. Industrial organization: theory and practice, Oxford University Press, London and New York; a survey of a hundred manufacturing firms with case studies.
- Yoshino 1968. Japan's Managerial System: Tradition and Innovation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
On this page, “read” means read by this series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.