Scelte di progettazione organizzativa

This essay addresses organizational design issues, placing them within organizational literature and highlighting the link between theories and managerial practices of organizational design. The aim isn’t to review a wide and different literature, but to highlight how at the basis of organizational design approaches and techniques, old and new, there are specific theoretical frameworks that drove their development. During more than one hundred years of organizational studies, the organizational issues were addressed by a variety of theories developed in different disciplines (sociological studies, psychological and social, economics and polytechnics). Compared to this variety and wealth of theories, the choice followed in this essay was to examine a specific perspective (called mainstream approach) that is characterized by a normative orientation being direct to identify organizational problems as well as to find practical arrangements for their solution. The organizational choices are divided into five levels of analysis and action, according to a common practice in all handbook of business organization in Italy and abroad. Particular attention is devoted to the clear definition of the concepts used and to the specific features of organizational language.