Conference: Making Organization Designs Effective, New York City, April 2004

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The Conference on Making Organization Designs Effective will assemble leading researchers from a variety of disciplines that have developed theories with implications for improving organizations. The focus of the conference will be on the organizational design implications of research findings. It will foster discussion of different organization design ideas that are represented by conference participants. To facilitate the conversion of abstract and research-based design ideas into practically useful ideas, the conference will be oriented around a significant real-life design problem: the redesign of a large scale organization. The conference participants will be given information about the focal organization and its issues and they will be asked to develop and present design ideas to deal with these issues. The intellectual contribution of the conference will center on the efforts made by participants to relate established research findings to one organization's specific design issues. This is an important intellectual challenge because before organization knowledge can be recognized to have value in the broader community and organization theories can gain recognition as being part of a mature intellectual discipline, the ideas that have been developed must be shown to be useful in solving practical problems. But determining usefulness involves extra-scientific criteria that are not directly considered in academic research. The intellectual challenge of the conference is to establish a bridge between organization knowledge that is based on sound academic research and organization design contributions that are considered useful and based on organizational needs. The broader impact of the conference is to extend organization research agendas to include usefulness as well as scientific criteria in their studies. In addition to its immediate practical value, the case study is intended to help participants see differences, compatibilities, and benefits in different design approaches. To achieve the broader impact, the papers and conclusions will be disseminated in a special issue of a leading journal and a more inclusive edited book presenting the conference papers and findings.