New Organizational Forms, Controls, and Institutions - Understanding the Tensions in 'Post-Bureaucratic' Organizations

This book highlights the growing number of 'post-bureaucratic' firms that are abandoning hierarchical organizational forms in favor of self-managing teams.  Addressing the need to outperform, these new organization types foresee the benefits of an organic structure with new and more indirect forms of control, and aim to coordinate the activities of highly-skilled workers without relying on a bureaucratic superstructure. The chapters explore the tensions that exist between external and internal institutional forces. As new forms of control strategies emerge, mostly value-based, this book accounts for the cognitive categories, conventions, rules and logic that should be integrated and combined with traditional forms of managerial controls in order to enable co-existence with established bureaucratic frameworks. This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of organizational behavior and innovation management, and also practitioners and managers aiming to shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to post-bureaucratic forms.


Maria Carmela Annosi is Assistant Professor at the Management Studies Group of the School of Social Sciences at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. She received her PhD at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands. Fellow in Management at LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy, her research interests include knowledge and innovation management.  Federica Brunetta is Assistant Professor at the Department of Business and Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy. She received a PhD from the Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Italy, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, USA. Her research interests include strategy and management of innovation.