Works
- Designing for complexity: using divisions and hierarchy to manage complex tasks, Organization Science 24(2), 339 to 355, 2013
- Supervising across borders: the case of multinational hierarchies, Organization Science 26(1), 277 to 292, 2015
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Archival studies of how firms divide and supervise their units.
Ideas
Divisions, hierarchy, and decomposability. Firms divisionalize more as task complexity rises but less as tasks become less decomposable, and they add hierarchy as both rise, to coordinate complex task systems that cannot be fully split. Caveat: One industry, U.S. equipment manufacturers, 1993 to 2003. Read in its abstract only.
Multinational hierarchies. MNCs assign foreign supervisors to subsidiaries in weak-institution countries, especially when their work is central to the parent's operations. Caveat: US manufacturers 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.