ABSTRACT
Research on organization design tends to utilize a variety of research approaches and methodologies. For the most part, this seems to have generated a static body of knowledge that is not always particularly relevant to the organizations studied (Stebbins and Shani 2002). We take a narrower focus in this chapter. We examine two research approaches to organization design that we have used to enhance our understanding of the topic. The two approaches are ‘comparative analysis’ and ‘collaborative’. The comparative analysis approach is a systematic comparative investigation of two or more organizations with a focus, in this case, on organization design research issues. In other comparative research studies, investigators may draw on a wide variety of both macro and micro organizational variables as the basis of comparison. In our approach, we have drawn on a data base that was developed from a study of organizational arrangements in a number of different countries (Stymne and the ORGNOVATION International Research Team 1996). The organizational arrangements all focused on a specific set of managerial innovations (which we have also called our ‘research themes’). We then compared organization design practices for these specific managerial innovations across different countries. For example, in one study, we compared and contrasted how the research theme of continuous quality improvement systems was designed in six different countries (Lillrank et al. 1998). In another study, we compared and contrasted the research theme of how government organizations in eight different countries designed organizations to support their chosen strategies of helping their small and medium-sized enterprises to succeed (Kolodny et al. 2001).
