Types of complementarity, combinative organization forms and structural heterogeneity: beyond discrete structural alternatives

In the first Section, this paper offer a critical re-reading of the notions of organization forms as clusters of 'attributes' in organization theory and organization economics aimed at singling out what they have established and what problems have to be solved. In the second Section, building on those elements and on earlier works of the authors, the paper provides a typology of organizational ‘features’, a theory of how they are expected to combine inspired by an analogy with chemistry, and a formalized operationalization of the main propositions through an innovative application of Boolean algebra.