Part III: Forms of Organization: A Definition of Organization Form.

This section presents an introduction to Part III of the book Organization and Economic Behavior, by Anna Grandori, which confronts design and assessment issues. Each chapter in Part III will provide two essential elements, although not always explained in the same order, a procedure for finding solutions that are effective, efficient and fair and a substantive assessment of which forms are superior in what circumstances within given portfolio of known organization solutions. All organization forms are described as configurations of rights and obligations and of coordination mechanisms among actors holding different rights. Both the definition of an organization form as a configuration of rights and coordination mechanisms and the distinction between design as a search for forms and design as the evaluation of forms, are crucial for realizing the type of integration between different perspectives sought in this book. In fact, a difference between the organization design approaches prevailing in organizational and economic models respectively is the focus on the heuristic search for superior solutions in the organization theory and strategy tradition and on optimizing the comparative evaluation of given structural alternatives in the organizational economics tradition.