Lifting parts: putting conceptual insights into practice

Abstract

An organization concept is “a more or less coherent, prescriptive vision on (aspects of) organization design”. Practitioners are often faced with the problem of how to use insights from organization concepts. The redesign of a parts distribution centre is discussed to illustrate how two organization concepts and insights from other sources were drawn on and combined to formulate a new organization design. We derive four different reasons for such combinations, namely conceptual clarification, conceptual additions, technical instrumentalization and legitimation.