Putting the “Design” Back into Organizational Design: The Case of High Social Value-Creative Business Models

The Origins Of An Insufficiently Leveraged Design Approach

Unprecedented levels of environmental complexity, speed of change, and intensity of transience are rendering it increasingly difficult to appreciate the benefits of coordinated human productive activity in ‘organizations’ as originally and more ideally conceived by such prominent representative contributors to organization studies as Adam Smith, Max Weber, Ronald Coase, or Peter Drucker.

Adam Smith captured the essence of the firm as a more sustainable alternative to the preceding centuries of trial and error to coordinate human innovative capabilities and generative energy (Smith, 2001). Under trial and error, resources were being repeatedly wastefully sacrificed; consequently, economic expansion was slow and social progress constrained. To meet the insatiable consumptive aspirations of the enlightened post-agrarian society, a novel construct was necessary. It would by far exceed the limitations of social structuration of the productive extended family in the cottage system as well as the capital-intensive and capitalist-centric entrepreneurial ventures of early corporate forms. It cleverly leveraged the ‘automative’ potential of machines of the early industrial movement to extend the life and capability of capital. And it combined it with the near-infinite possibility of labor to specialize.