Office Design and Organizations: 1. Theoretical Basis

This paper is the first of two which taken together will give an account of some research on the relationship between one kind of designed environment, the office interior, and one kind of social group, the office organization. This first paper reviews some attempts to describe the nature of this kind of relationship. The question of criticality is discussed and doubt is cast on the advisability of seeking direct evidence of effects of the environment on behaviour. Instead, a simpler approach is advocated which, by giving equal attention to people and buildings and by measuring both in a quantitative way, attempts to test whether correspondences exist between them. To this general approach is added an important idea from organization theory—that structural variations make it possible to categorize types of organization. Two current idees regus in office design—that layout should reflect patterns of interaction and be as egalitarian as possible—are attacked in the light of this view of organization theory. It is argued that not only is it likely that there will be variations in, for example, degrees of interaction and of power sharing, but that these organizational variations will be reflected in corresponding variations in layout design. This is the theoretical basis for the empirical test of a hypothetical model relating two aspects of organizational structure and two kinds of variation in office layout design which will be described in the second paper.