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

关于使组织设计有效的会议将汇集来自不同学科的领先研究人员，这些学科已经开发出对改进组织有影响的理论。会议的重点将是研究结果对组织设计的影响。它将促进对与会者所代表的不同组织设计思想的讨论。为了促进将抽象和基于研究的设计想法转化为实用的想法，会议将围绕一个重大的现实生活设计问题：大规模组织的重新设计。将向与会者提供关于重点组织及其问题的信息，并要求他们制定和提出处理这些问题的设计想法。会议的智力贡献将集中在与会者努力将既定的研究成果与一个组织的具体设计问题联系起来。这是一个重要的智力挑战，因为在组织知识在更广泛的社区中具有价值以及组织理论作为成熟智力学科的一部分得到承认之前，已经开发的想法必须证明对解决实际问题有用。但确定有用性涉及非科学标准，而学术研究不会直接考虑这些标准。会议的智力挑战是在基于可靠的学术研究的组织知识和被认为有用的、基于组织需求的组织设计贡献之间建立一座桥梁。会议的更广泛影响是扩大组织研究议程，在其研究中纳入有用性和科学标准。除了其直接的实用价值，该案例研究还旨在帮助参与者看到不同设计方法的差异、兼容性和好处。为了产生更广泛的影响，这些文件和结论将在一份主要期刊的特刊和一本更具包容性的编辑书籍中散发，介绍会议的文件和结论。

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.