Works
- The flattening firm: evidence from panel data on the changing nature of corporate hierarchies, Review of Economics and Statistics 88(4), 759 to 773, 2006
- The flattened firm: not as advertised, California Management Review 55(1), 5 to 23, 2012
- Who lives in the C-suite? Organizational structure and the division of labor in top management, Management Science 60(4), 824 to 844, 2014
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The flattening of corporate hierarchies
Ideas
Functional centralization. With Guadalupe and Li, found that the executive team reporting to the CEO in large U.S. firms doubled from the mid-1980s, driven mainly by functional rather than general managers, a shift tied to diversification and information technology investment. Caveat: Large U.S. firms; panel data on senior management positions.
The flattened firm. Argued that flattening can have the opposite effect from its intention: flattened firms typically show more control and decision making at the top. Caveat: A panel of more than 300 large U.S. firms from 1986 to 1999, interviews with seven CEOs, and time-use data on 65 CEOs, read in the working paper.
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.