Item

The inevitability and irreversibility of organizational uncontrollability

van der Mandele,H.C.
; 
van Witteloostuijn,Arjen
Abstract
In this paper, a classic and seminal contribution of Williamson (J Polit Econ 75:123–138, 1967), “Hierarchical control and optimum firm size”, is revisited so as to remove two of its restrictive assumptions. The introduction of the dynamics of the quality of vertical communication into Williamson’s static model and the development of a simulation to analyze these dynamics provide the opportunity to demonstrate the plausibility of a new conjecture: in each and every hierarchically structured organization, irreversible organizational uncontrollability is ultimately bound to arise, even in a completely stable environment. This is our main contribution. Moreover, we demonstrate that this conjecture is also valid for non-hierarchically structured organizations.
Description
Date
2015-12
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Collections
Tilburg University Research Output Collection
Show all metadata
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
control loss, uncontrollability, serial reproduction, organizational failure, simulation, stochastic logistic equation
Citation
van der Mandele, H C & van Witteloostuijn, A 2015, 'The inevitability and irreversibility of organizational uncontrollability', Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 380-405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-015-9190-0
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/63854
Embedded videos