Some thoughts on the influence of technology on organisation structure

Technology is an important component of the structure of an organization when using the widest possible definition of technology as the art or science of production. As a causal variable for structure it has had its share of interest from past researchers but there have not been conclusive results. For a technology to have an effect on the structure of the firm it must be essential to the firm's operations, such that i f it were removed the firm could no longer operate in its accustomed manner. However, the search for causal relationships presents a problem as it is not possible to exclude other contingent variables. Population ecology models (Hannan and Freeman 1977) and in particular the con figuration a I model of Miller and Mintzberg (1984) address these issues without implying causality and this approach has been used here to predict configurations that are consistent with the technology employed by organizations. Two conclusions can be drawn from this approach: first, organizations will cluster round a small number of common configurations so that observation of a small number of variables, such as technology, are sufficient to assign an organization to a configuration and on that basis make predictions about other organizational characteristics; and secondly the effects of change within the organization, such as a change in production technology, can be predicted.