Configurational analysis and organization design: toward a theory of structural heterogeneity

This chapter reconstructs the roots, evolution and some prospects of configurational analysis (CA) in organization theory (OT) and organizational economics (OE), focusing on those components of CA that are particularly relevant to organizational design. This excursus leads to: a) revealing the presence of elements of CA in many OT and OE approaches - a continuity that is seldom acknowledged and arguably extends (rather than diminishes) the implications and applications of CA; b) identifying ‘structural heterogeneity’ (SH) -both ‘internal’ among organizational attributes within a configuration, and ‘external’ among configurations under the same conditions (or ‘equifinality’)- as an organizational property that can be distinctively studied by CA. This claim, as well as the substantive insights that can be gained by a configurational analysis of structural heterogeneity, is substantiated by an empirical analysis on a multi-sector sample of firms