Greenwood and Miller
interest in issues of management and organiza- tion— only two chapters attend to matters of in- ternal management and organization. Instead, this Handbook systematically reviews currently preva- lent theories of organizations (such as institu- tional theory) and discusses issues such as emo- tion, aesthetics, and compassion. Emphasis has clearly moved away from concerns of management and organizational design.
Our point in drawing this comparison is not to imply that either Handbook is wrong or misleading or superior in its coverage or focus. On the con- trary, both are excellent, perhaps definitive sum- maries of the field of organization theory at the time of their publication. They reflect the field. As such, they highlight how our attention has shifted. An unfortunate consequence of this shift in attention, however, is that we have little un- derstanding of the newer, more complex organi- zational arrangements that now populate the or- ganizational landscape, such as transnational organizations, vertically disintegrated firms, and network, modular, or even virtual organizations (Walsh, Meyer, & Schoonhoven, 2006). Instead, our theoretical appreciation of organizational de- sign leans toward obsolescence. To quote, again, Bartlett and Ghoshal (2002, p. 9): “[T]he bad news is that many of the old models, concepts and frameworks that we developed . . . no longer prove as powerful and robust as they once did.”
The “Causes” of Neglect
One reason for the current neglect of organiza- tional design is that the field has moved its focus, empirically and theoretically, from the organization to the field, population, and com- munity. This shift in the level of analysis oc- curred because of the exciting and profound questions raised in the late 1970s. Attention was pulled toward new levels of analysis, such as “organizational fields,” and “populations” of or- ganizations. But associated with the shift was a move from rich to truncated descriptions of complex organizational forms—and, at the same time, from the recognition of subtle and sub- stantial differences across types of organizations to generalization to all organizations. As a con- sequence, our understanding of organizational
design became depleted and increasingly out of date.
A second reason for the current neglect of organizational design, and one that we believe to be fundamental, is the sheer complexity of many of today’s organizations. This off-putting complex- ity poses significant methodological problems, in- cluding the need for large commitments of re- search time and resources. Today’s organizational designs cannot be approached using convenient databases. Instead, they demand close-range and detailed studies, where data collection may be extraordinarily demanding of scholarly commit- ment, and where access may not be readily provided. The more detailed, qualitative, and time-consuming approaches exemplified by, for example, Mike Tushman, Jay Galbraith, Andrew Pettigrew, Shona Brown, Kathy Eisenhardt, Sumantra Ghoshal, James Baron, and John Child—though profoundly more attentive to or- ganizational design and, in our view, much more informative about it—are far tougher to carry out by scholars under great time and publication pres- sures. They do not fit easily with career milestones and persuasively deter younger and senior scholars alike (Miller, 2009).
A third reason for the neglect has been the deepening interest in understanding parts of the overall design. Those who have retained an inter- est in organizational-level phenomena have in- creasingly narrowed their scope of attention. For example, human resource practices are commonly studied, as are the compositions of boards of di- rectors, where interest is in their influence (e.g., do more women make a difference? or more out- siders?) or their role in the diffusion of practices (e.g., do directors act as carriers of ideas?). How- ever, not all aspects of design have received at- tention. Anand, Gardner, and Morris (2007) re- ported that structures are much less examined now than several decades ago. But even when it is studied, structure is often treated as if it were synonymous with design. One consequence of this focus on organizational design parts is that al- though we may learn much about the bits of an organization, we have little understanding of the overall organization.
80 NovemberAcademy of Management Perspectives