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Book Reviews : MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT IN THE ORGANISATION DAVID ASHTON and MARK EASTERBY-SMITH London: Macmillan 1979 120 pp. £8·95 ISBN 0-333-21653-9

To those who regard the analysis of organisation structure as a somewhat abstract subject, let it be stated at the outset that Mintzberg is interested in structure because of its implications for organizational functioning, and his analysis throughout reflects this emphasis. For example, the first part of the book deals not with structure but with a discussion of how organisations function and, in particular, with a description of the five basic parts of the organisation and their interrelationships. Thus the foundations of the theoretical framework are laid, to be followed by an analysis of the concepts which constitute the main elements of the theory, examining first the design parameters and subsequently assessing the status of the evidence for the impact of the major contingent factors upon these parameters. In the final section of the book, these elements are combined to form the ’theory of configurations’ in which the author argues that it is possible to identify five basic organisational configurations which represent clusters, or ’gestalts’, of interdependent relationships between an organisation’s contingent factors and its structure. Each of these configurations is distinguished by the part of the organisation that is dominant, the main mechanism for achieving coordination, the main design parameters and the associated contingency factors. Mintzberg calls these configurations the SIMPLE Structure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, the Divisionalised Form and the Adhocracy (better known to most as the Matrix Organisation) arguing persuasively that they can be regarded as pure types of structure, as a set of five forces acting on almost every organisation and pulling it in different structural directions, and as bases for describing and analysing both hybrid structures and structural transitions. In his note to the reader, the author claims to have written this book for all those with an interest in