ABSTRACT
Although other theories of this type exist, the term contingency theory as used in the field of macro organizational behavior has become associated primarily with the formulations of Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch. The basic statements of the theory appear in an article (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967a) and in a book (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967b), though reports on pilot studies and preliminary hypotheses that exerted considerable influence on these formulations were published earlier (Lorsch 1965, Lorsch and Lawrence 1965).
