Authors:Pajunen, Kalle (2008).Full text: 'The nature of organizational mechanisms'Organization Studies, 29 (11): 1449–1468.

The abstract

One of the basic objectives in organization research is to examine how some organizational occurrence or outcome comes about or, even more fundamentally, to explain how things work. I argue that we can shed more light on these issues by examining the mechanisms driving the organizational processes. In this article I attempt to elucidate the nature of organizational mechanisms, thereby providing a coherent explanatory foundation for process research and processual research strategies. In order to illustrate the nature of mechanisms and explanations by mechanisms, a case study of the organizational decline and failure process of the Finnish conglomerate Tampella is reported.