Management and Structure

In all the commentary on computing, one of the most durable themes has been its "revolutionary" repercussions for the ways in which organization are managed. Like other empirical investigators on this point, the authors find no evidence that computerization has any net tendency to render organizations more or less hierarchical. Beyond prognostications on management hierarchy per se, many commentators have prophesied that computerization would lead to far-reaching changes in the distribution of work roles. The level of computing reported in 1985 had almost as strong a relationship to proportion of clerical staff in 1993. No other job category showed such effects under multivariate analysis. But it is clear that the new information technologies do open the way for a host of new kinds of relationships across organizational boundaries—providing all sorts of ways for organizations to "mind one another's business".