The British academic, Joan Woodward, conducted an extensive, comparative empirical study from 1950 to 1959 at the South East Essex College of Technology and the Imperial College of Science and Technology in the United Kingdom. The study focused on the relationship between organisational structure and organisational performance. It measured a firm's comparative...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, synthesised organisational design literature into five ideal organisational forms or configurations that do not exist in the real world, but provide consultants and managers a framework to understand and design organisational structures. Mintzberg defined organisational structure as "the sum...

During the Second World War, the mathematician, Norbert Wiener, and several colleagues developed a new branch of applied science and named this science of information feedback systems "cybernetics". Cybernetics can be used to analyse properties of a particular, dynamic system using control and communication principles. The theory focuses on the system's...