ABSTRACT
It is now an established part of organizational theory that different kinds of organizations are needed to perform different kinds of tasks-there is no one best way to organize. This was not true some thirty years ago when theory was still searching for the all-purpose organization. The change has been brought about by contingency theory. Many scholars contributed to the origin of the contingency approach to organization design and many more have subsequently developed it.* It remains the dominant approach to organization design.
