Remembering Paul Lawrence

Remembering Paul Lawrence

Probably most members of the OMT community have heard by now that Paul R. Lawrence died on Tuesday, November 1, 2011.  The Harvard Business School has published a full and impressive obituary for him.  However, I thought it important that the OMT community should mark his passing as one of the scholars who has been important in shaping our field. His early work with Jay Lorsch, published as Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. Boston: Harvard University, 1967 was critical in laying the foundations for contingency theory. It was named the best management book of 1967 by the Academy of Management and it has been cited more than 2,000 times.

In that work, and much of the work that followed, Paul Lawrence was concerned with the ways in which the structural characteristics of organizations were related to the environments in which they were set, especially the elements of technology and markets although other elements were also examined.  At the heart of this work is the deceptively simple idea that to be an effective organization, the greater the environmental diversity facing an organization, then the greater the structural differentiation, and, the greater that structural differentiation then the greater the degree of structural integration.

This proposition is the very heart of contingency theory.  From it the two key notions of internal fit and external fit could be derived.  In these terms, internal fit is the appropriate relationship between structural differentiation and structural integration; external fit is the appropriate relationship between these organizational structural elements and the degree of environmental diversity.  These ideas are absolutely seminal to the way we now think about organizations.  Indeed, a measure of their foundational nature is the way in which they are taken-for-granted.  Ideas live on, independently of those who developed them.

The sad event of Paul Lawrence’s death provides us with the opportunity to link these ideas that have been and continue to be critical to our discipline to the person who was central in developing them and thus, changing the way in which we think.  Indeed, not only was there a lifetime of research in these ideas for Paul and his students, but they continue to inform all of us in the OMT community and to provide us with ideas for current research.  In the week before I heard of Paul Lawrence’s death I recommended his work on organization and environment to two new doctoral students.

As the HBS obituary makes clear there was much, much more to Paul Lawrence than the work of the 60s that has been so important for all of us.  As Mike Tushman says in that obituary, "One of the early and most important figures in organizational behavior, Paul Lawrence legitimized it as a field worthy of study at a business school.  He was a pioneer in creating a body of work, a cadre of students, and a doctoral program in organizational behavior that has aspired to do research that is both professionally rigorous as well as relevant to practitioners."

Paul Lawrence was certainly an important influence on my thinking, even though we only met once. His ideas continue to live with me because of the way they introduced me to new ways of seeing organizations. He is to be saluted as one of the giants of our field.

C.R. (Bob) Hinings
Professor Emeritus
University of Alberta
School of Business