Studentships
Business School
Reconfiguration Theory for Adaptive Enterprises and Industrial Networks
Dr Rob Dekkers
rob.dekkers@uws.ac.uk
This project aims at developing reconfiguration theory for the adaptive enterprise, a concept that has found resonance in the academic community on operations management and industrial networks. It finds its base in the underlying premise that each market opportunity requires an adequate response from an industrial network (in that sense these concepts can be seen as sucessor to the theory on agility in the 1990s; only few have published on Adaptive Enterprises).
The flexibility of a network relies on the deployment of resources to capture market opportunities and thereto needs control structures and organisational structures that fit the actual demand. The fact that these structures each exist for different aspects and that even these aspects might drive optimisation cycles, has lead to earlier proposals for a dynamic structure for the organisation that eases adaptations by companies to particular market opportunities.
These studies found their origins in the continuous shifting environment of industrial companies and the ongoing development of technological processes. These proposals include a blueprint to tune the organisational structures to yearly shifting demands and requirements, based on the organelle structure, a concept from Applied Systems Theory. Such a proposal might hold promises for the challenges networks face. Further development will require an intense studies about the effect of capturing market opportunities on reconfiguration issues (it builds on strengths in Applied Systems Theory, industrial networks and design of organisations within the Business School).