Works
- Strategy and structural adjustment to regain fit and performance: in defence of contingency theory, Journal of Management Studies 24(1), 1 to 24, 1987
- American anti-management theories of organization: a critique of paradigm proliferation, Cambridge University Press, 1995
- The contingency theory of organizations, SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA (Foundations for Organizational Science), 2001
- Organization theory as a positive science, In Haridimos Tsoukas and Christian Knudsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory, Oxford University Press, chapter 1, 39 to 62, 2003
- Stopford and Wells were right! MNC matrix structures do fit a 'high-high' strategy, Management International Review 52(5), 671 to 689, 2012
- Fit: the key to organizational design, Journal of Organization Design 3(3), 38 to 45, 2014
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The defense of contingency theory
Ideas
Structural adjustment to regain fit. Donaldson proposed that misfit lowers performance, which prompts structural adjustment toward fit, and defended contingency theory against its critics. Caveat: His critique of rival paradigms is itself disputed.
When MNCs use a matrix. With Jane Qiu, a revised Stopford and Wells model in which corporate integration and area diversification predict matrix use. Caveat: Preliminary support.
Fit as the key to design. With Joffe, argued that designs that fit their situation perform better than designs that do not, and showed how to align a design to three situational factors: competitive strategy, organization size, and task uncertainty. Caveat: A short practitioner-facing article restating the contingency argument. Only its abstract and opening were read.
Organization theory as a positive science. Argued that positive organizational science, which explains organizations as driven by their environment through empirically validated causal theory, has made considerable progress, and that organizational portfolio theory, if later research corroborates it, may explain organizational change beyond what non-positivist analyses offer. Caveat: A statement of a position, not a test. Read in its abstract only.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.