What is Organizational Structure: Integrated components, their relationships, and working processes that describe the strategic dimensions of an organization

Understanding the social context of an organization is a precursor to managing tacit knowledge. This chapter describes a three-dimensional social-context framework comprising factors, trust, and manageability. Factors are underlying characteristics - situation, interaction, and scale - that affect all aspects of the social structure. Trust classifies criteria that affect trust at individual, group, and organizational levels. Manageability lists methods of enhancing indicators for each social context criteria. The framework is based on patterns and clusters of 1200 terms found in a survey of the social-science literature related to social structures. The framework is presented in a format that facilitates prioritizing the most important criteria for an organization to focus on. Understanding how social context affects organizations will greatly facilitate tacit knowledge management.