Organizational Delsign in Public Sector

Although in public administration few theoretical constructs are ôperfectly serviceable,ö Mintzberg offers a useful guide to organizational design in the public sector. Mintzberg's model is more appropriately classified as a typology or ideal type, which is a constructive model for viewing organizational structure in many, though not all, instances. There are clearly weaknesses in Mintzberg's model, as in any model of social organization, but these weaknesses do not render Mintzberg's typology irrelevant.

One plausible reason for the popularity of typologies is that they appear to provide a parsimonious framework for describing complex organizational forms and for explaining outcomes such as organizational effectiveness or groupthink. Typologists usually achieve parsimony by providing elegant descriptions of their typologies and glossing over the complex processes that determine the focal organizational outcomes. The cost associated with this parsimony is that most typological theories are inadequately developed because the causal processes operating within each type of organization are not fully specified. Generally, these complex processes are summarized simply as the internal consistency or "fit" among the important contextual, structural, or strategic factors. This over

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ructs are the dimensions used to describe each ideal type in the theory. For example, Mintzberg (1993, pp. 123-124) described his five ideal types using first-order contextual constructs such as age, size, environmental uncertainty, and so forth, and first-order structural constructs such as formalization, specialization, centralization, and so on. Mintzberg relies heavily on design parameters to describe the nature of his ideal types (Mintzberg, 1993, p. 26). The design parameters help shape the potential for organizational structure. These parameters include such factors as job specialization, behavior formalizations, training, unit groupings, size of the organization, planning an control systems, liaison devices, and so forth. Thus, coordination mechanisms and design parameters work together in shaping the internal structure of the organization. However, the final structure of an organization is also affected by the surrounding environment. These environmental factors, which Mintzberg calls situation or contingency factors, consist of such elements as age of the organization, operating technical systems, and power relationships. Although Mintzberg's model is more a predictive model, it also provides significant clues for mana
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)