The goal of every author is to write a paper that readers (and reviewers) find convincing. Since writers of papers based on case research do not have recourse to the canonical statement “results are significant at p _ 0.05” that helps assuage readers’ skepticism of empirical papers, researchers using case research often feel they are fighting an uphill battle to persuade their readers. In this short essay, I provide some thoughts guided by my experience of reading, reviewing, and writing papers based on case‐based research over the last decade. These are clearly only the views of this particular writer and thus should be taken with a considerable grain of salt. I am seeking here more to provoke thought than to provide answers.

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Abstract:We examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another. An agent-based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly: a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates, an incentive system that rewards subordinates for departmental or firm-wide performance, the decomposition of an organization's many decisions into departments, the underlying pattern of interactions among decisions, and limits on the ability of managers to process information. Interdependencies arise among these features because of a basic, general tension. To be successful, an organization must search broadly for good sets of decisions , but it must also stabilize around good decisions once discovered. An effective organization balances search and stability. We identify sets of design elements that encourage broad search and others that promote stability. The adoption of elements that encourage broad search typically raises the marginal benefit of other elements that provide offsetting stability. Hence, the need to balance search and stability generates interdependencies among the design elements. We pay special attention to interdependencies that involve the vertical hierarchy. Our findings confirm many aspects of conventional wisdom about vertical hierarchies, but put boundary conditions on others. We place limits, for instance, on the received wisdom that firm-wide incentives and capable subordinates make top-level oversight less valuable. We also identify circumstances in which vertical hierarchies can lead to inferior long-term performance.1

Ziedonis, three anonymous reviewers, and seminar participants at the University of Pennsylvania, University of MOnster, the Strategic Management Society Meeting 2000, and the University of Utah and Brigham Young University Winter Strategy Conference 2001 for helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.This paper uses a longitudinal case study of the mutual fund provider, The Vanguard Group, to understand the developmental processes that lead to organizational configurations and fit. A new method for determining an organization's core elements is developed, and four processes are identified that describe the creation and subsequent elaboration of these core elements: thickening (reinforcement of an existing core element by new elaborating elements), patching (creation of a new core element and its reinforcement by new elaborating elements), coasting (no further elaboration of a new core element in a given period), and trimming (deletion of a core element and its elaborating elements). The four processes are used to describe organizations' development paths toward configurations and their transitions between configurations, including two new ideal types, termed thin-to-thick and patch-by-patch, as well as two known paths between configurations, the punctuated equilibrium path and reorientation through linear progression.?Scholars in a variety of literatures have conceptualized firms as systems of highly interdependent elements (e.g.

We use an innovative technique to examine an enduring but recently neglected question: How do environmental turbulence and complexity affect the appropriate formal design of organizations? We construct an agent-based simulation in which multidepartment firms with different designs face environments whose turbulence and complexity we control. The model’s results produce two sets of testable hypotheses. One set pinpoints formal designs that cope well with three different environments: turbulent settings, in which firms must improve their performance speedily; complex environments, in which firms must search broadly; and settings with both turbulence and complexity, in which firms must balance speed and search. The results shed new light on longstanding notions such as equifinality. The other set of hypotheses argues that the impact of individual design elements on speed and search often depends delicately on specific powers granted to department heads, creating effects that run contrary to conventional wisdom and intuition. Ample processing power at the bottom of a firm, for instance, can slow down the improvement and narrow the search of the firm as a whole. Differences arise between our results and conventional wisdom when conventional thinking fails to account for the powers of department heads—powers to withhold information about departmental options, to control decision-making agendas, to veto firmwide alternatives, and to take unilateral action. Our results suggest how future empirical studies of organizational design might be fruitfully coupled with rigorous agent-based modeling efforts.