Honoring HBS’s Organization Men
A SEMINAL WORK: Lorsch and Lawrence, together again.
Photo by Neal Hamberg
A celebration of the past and a look to the future were all part of the program at an evening last December with HBS professor emeritus Paul Lawrence and professor Jay Lorsch, authors of Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. The conversation took place in Spang-ler’s Williams Room in conjunction with a conference on organization design that used their 1967 classic as a jumping-off point for assessing research in the field today. The gathering drew participants from around the globe and included doctoral students and junior faculty working in the area of organization design, as well as more senior contributors to the field. Their goal was to define and discuss the open research questions that trace their beginnings back to Lawrence and Lorsch’s seminal work.
HBS professor Nitin Nohria and senior lecturer Robert Eccles moderated the discussion. Nohria, noting that the book turns on just a few key concepts (see sidebar), asked how some of the book’s core ideas had come about.
“It’s hard to figure out where ideas come from,” said Lawrence, although he and Lorsch did cite issues that cropped up in their fieldwork with a number of independent companies. In a humorous aside, Lawrence noted that the book’s French publisher had translated its subtitle into Managing Differentiation or Integration, not “and,” as written. Yet “making an organization whole in spite of its differences is the essence of what management is all about,” he said.
Lawrence described how his work on large, complex companies caused him to wonder about organizations outside business, leading to his studies of cities, hospitals, schools, and governments. His most recent book (with Nohria) is Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices. Lorsch, who began his work as a doctoral student under the guidance of Lawrence, explained how his research had led him to think about the connection between corporate boards and organization design. Lorsch noted that Fritz Roethlisberger, a lead researcher on the Hawthorne experiments, developed the idea of organizations as social systems. “That’s been the underlying framework of everything I’ve done,” said Lorsch, the author most recently of Back to the Drawing Board: Designing Corporate Boards for a Complex World.
One participant wondered how the structure of financial firms impacts the financial crisis. “I’m intrigued,” said Lawrence. “You may not call it a structural element, but one can think of values and moral standards as an integrative device that you enforce throughout your system.” There would be no basis for creating a social system, he added, if human beings’ sole influence was rational self-interest. “We have acquisitive and social instincts. It’s not all or nothing, it’s both — that’s what makes us such interesting creatures.”
