60: Contingency Theory — Joan Woodward (Part 1)

Joan Woodward was a pioneer in organization theory, and in this episode we explore her seminal work Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice, originally published in 1965. The book presents the results of an extensive longitudinal study of the technologies, processes, and systems used by over one hundred industrial firms concentrated in southeast England over a ten year period. The studies produced a finding that successful firms did not follow a single ‘best way’ to manage the firm, but that each had an optimal way based on the congruence or alignment between the technologies and the processes & systems to manage them. This included differences among firms regarding the dominance of marketing, research and development, and production; variations in status of employees among various roles, and variations in how success is measured. Follow-on studies examined how firms underwent transformational change from one form of industry to another, largely confirming the prior results.