New forms of organizing in Australia, 2000-2004

This paper presents preliminary results from a survey of new forms of organizing in the highest grossing Australian owned companies. The Australian NewForms Survey draws on the groundbreaking Innovative Forms of Organizing (INNFORM) Survey conducted in Europe, USA and Japan in the late 1990s (Whittington, Pettigrew, Peck, Fenton, and Conyon 1999). The NewForms study seeks to identify emerging trends in forms of organizing within Australia’s largest companies and the extent to which the uptake of new forms of organizing signals a commensurate decrease in traditional forms. The analysis focuses on changes across three organizational dimensions: structures, processes and boundaries. The results suggest that for organizational structures there has been a significant shift from operational to strategic decentralization. For organizational processes, there have been substantial increases in both horizontal and vertical linkages and in the adoption of a range of new human resource practices. In relation to boundaries, alliances and partnerships have increased, signaling a greater focus on mainstream business activities and a move away from peripheral diversification. Overall, the prevalence of new forms of organizing has increased within Australian companies, but these new forms of organizing have emerged alongside traditional forms. This finding is consistent with research in other countries, and provides further evidence of complementarities between new and traditional forms of organizing.