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Construction Principles and Design Rules in the Case of Circular Design

Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Maastricht University and Sociocratic Center Netherlands, Pieter Christiaanstraat 61, 3066 TB Rotterdam, The Netherlands
a.g.l.romme{at}tm.tue.nl
gendenburg{at}sociocratie.nl

This paper proposes science-based organization design that uses construction principles and design rules to guide practitioner-academic projects. Organization science implies construction principles for creating and implementing designs. These principles serve to construct design rules that are instrumental in developing organization designs. Testing and implementing designs require pragmatic experimentation in complex, dynamic settings. The authors explore a circular design process as an example of science-based organization design. Tests of this circular process in over 30 organizations suggest that construction principles are important for creating new design rules as well as for a deeper understanding of the systems and practices created from these rules. In addition, explicit principles and rules for organization design appear to facilitate the transfer of learning between different projects. As such, they can help reconnect organization research to ongoing design work.

Key Words: organization design; construction principles; design rules; experimentation; circular design

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