The Dynamics of Big Business

9    The Organizational Form

H-Form versus M-Form

9.1 THE RELEVANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHOICES

In the earliest years of their expansion, the first large corporations in the United States used a functional kind of organizational form, meaning a structure in which tasks are immediately below the chief executive manager and are organized along the line of operating functions in terms of finance, production, marketing and so on. Nevertheless, this organizational form started to be inadequate when companies became increasingly diversified as they exploited economies of scale and scope. The functional structure demonstrated to be insufficient for simultaneously managing a significant variety of products and effectively dividing long term planning ...