Where do organizational forms come from?

Abstract

Most theory and research on organizations assumes that the great diversity of organizational attributes reflects variation in implementation of a relatively small number of forms. Modern conceptions of organizational form concentrate on discontinuities in distributions of either attributes or relationships with other organizations. We argue that this approach be supplemented with an explicitly dynamic one that focuses on processes that create and erode boundaries in the organizational world. This paper discusses some of the advantages of this approach and specifies a number of processes that create and erode boundaries around organizational populations.