文档介绍：Ml
A NOTE TO THE READER
What could be more important to the effective functioning of aniza-
tions—from repair shops to panies, police forces to na-
tional governments—than the design of their structures? Yet what do we
really know about such design?
Ironically, we know a great deal, but not in a form accessible to those
people who must create such designs—managers, staff specialists, and
consultants. The vast literature anizational structuring, much of it
based on systematic empirical research, has largely escaped the practi-
tioner, for two reasons. First, it is mostly contained in articles and books
written in an academic style, for other researchers. Those practitioners
willing to work through the jargon found that the orientation of such
writings was more on what is than what should be; in other words, on
what takes place anizations rather than on how to design an effective
organization. Second, despite the vastness of the literature and its many
available insights, what it lacked was synthesis. The practioner could find
these insights in no one place; he or she virtually had to wade through the
entire range of literature to find out what it had to say. And even then, the
synthesis was left to the reader. Contradictions abound in the research
findings, with little real reconciliation even attempted. So whoever had the
patience to go through all this literature was apt to emerge more confused
than before he or she began.
In the mid-1970s, I set out to try to order this literature, to extract its
key messages and—above all—to synthesize them into an integrated pic-
ture of the structuring anizations. The result of almost three full years
of effort was a book by that title, published by Prentice-Hall in 1979. That
book containted 512 pages of very small type, but it satisfied my intentions:
to synthesize the research literature anizational structuring (it was
subtitled, "A Synthesis of the Research") and to address the issue