Towards a New Generation of Organizational Design

Organizational design is an important and longstanding issue in management thought. Until recently, the literature on this subject developed incrementally. But during the last decades, several attempts have been made to renew organizational design considerably by combining it with principles from organizational development, a current in management literature that was considered antithetical to organizational design. Because of this, a whole new generation of organizational design approaches appears to be developing. This article gives an overview of the history of organizational design in order to clarify these recent developments. It portrays the classic design approach, gives an overview of the criticism on classic design and the developmental approaches that were created as an alternative, and elaborates their synthesis in a new generation of design approaches. To contribute to the further development of this new generation, this article concludes with a discussion of perspectives on design that can strengthen the theoretical basis of these new approaches, in particular designing as reflection-in-action, co-construction, and bricolage.