The Aston Findings on Centralization: Further Discussion

Recently Child (1972) has argued that the results obtained from a number of studies of the dimensions of organizational structure indicate a general compensatory relationship between greater delegation of decision making and greater through bureaucratic controls. This was manifested in the National study (of 82 manufacturing and service organizations in England and Scotland) by moderately high negative correlations between the variables comprising the two clusters of structuring of activities and centralization. The structuring of activities cluster is composed of several variables the most important of which are functional specialization, overall role specialization, overall standardizations and overall formalization (Pugh et al. 1968). The second cluster will here be treated as consisting purely of overall centralization (Child 1972: 171). The results from the earlier Aston study of 52 organizations of diverse sorts (manufacturing, retail, government, utility) were broadly consistent in that the direction of the correlations were similar, but the magnitude of the negative correlation between the two clusters was lower (Child 1972: 170). In particular there were lower correlations between overall centralization and standardization, and formalization, and these were not improved when the manufacturing only organizations in the Aston sample were isolated. Since the Aston results were somewhat discrepant to those obtained both in the National and the Coventry studies (Hinings and Lee, 1971), this provided a puzzle which Child attempted to resolve by reference to the heterogeneity in organizational status in the Aston sample (Child 1972: 171).