Proposals for Further Research

Abstract

One of the basic objectives of this study was to establish fundamental structural elements which all industrial organizations have in common, and to determine the properties of these elements which can be varied during organization design to fit the structural element in question to a particular situation. Examples are hierarchy, coordination modes and the Aufbau-Ablauf framework. The fitting of a hierarchy concerns e.g. the choice of the span of the various levels and the choice of the boundaries between the subsystems at each level (using one or more of the specialization principles of section 13.2). The fitting of coordination modes concerns e.g. the choice of the coordination mix (see section 12.5), including the choice of the power ratio to be used by mode-1 coordination, and finally the fitting of an Aufbau-Ablauf framework concerns e.g. the choice of the number of control levels in the Ablauf structure, the determination of the interfaces between these levels and of the degree of connectiveness of the various control subsystems at each control level.