Organizational innovation and organizational change.

Three ideas—a complex division of labor, an organic structure, and a high-risk strategy—provoke consistent findings relative to organizational innovation. Of these three ideas, the complexity of the division of labor is most important because it taps the organizational learning, problem-solving, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 25; pp. 597 - 623
Main Author: Hage, J. T.
Format: Article
Published: Annual Reviews Inc. 1999
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:Three ideas—a complex division of labor, an organic structure, and a high-risk strategy—provoke consistent findings relative to organizational innovation. Of these three ideas, the complexity of the division of labor is most important because it taps the organizational learning, problem-solving, and creativity capacities of the organization. The importance of a complex division of labor has been underappreciated because of the various ways in which it has been measured, which in turn reflect the macroinstitutional arrangements of the educational system within a society. These ideas can be extended to the study of interorganizational relationships and the theories of organizational change. Integrating these theories would provide a general organizational theory of evolution within the context of knowledge societies. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.