Organizational Structure

IntroductIon For many decades, organization scientists have paid considerable attention to the link between knowledge and organization structure. An early contributor to these discussions was Max Weber (1922), who elaborated his concepts of professional bureaucracy. History shows a multitude of other descriptions and propositions which depict knowledge-friendly organization structures such as the 'organic form' for knowledge-intensive innovation promoted by Burns and Stalker (1961), professional bureaucracies and adhocracies described by Mintzberg (1983), and the brain metaphor for organization structure (Morgan, 1986). Discussions on such knowledgefriendly organization structures led to many neologisms including the flexible, intelligent, smart, hy-pertext, N-form, inverted, network, cellular, or modular organization. This article discusses the fundamental importance of organization structure for a knowledge perspective on organizations. This discussion involves two classes of questions. Organization structure can be studied as the backdrop against which the knowledge aspects of organizations take shape. Key questions then are how different structural configurations involve stimuli and barriers to the generation and embedding of organizational knowledge through such processes as knowledge exploration and knowledge sharing. Organization structure can also be studied from the perspective of organization design, which is the premeditated construction or change of organization structure (see Bowditch & Buono, 1985). Questions that appear then include: what are possible design interventions and how does one assess their knowledge-friendliness? The article addresses both classes of questions. Its objective therefore is: (1) to look at what defines a knowledge-friendly organization structure, and (2) to explore which interventions organizations have at their disposal when trying to achieve such a structure.