adhocracy

adhocracy, an organizational design whose structure is highly flexible, loosely coupled, and amenable to frequent change.

Adhocracy arises out of the need of formal organizations to be able to recognize, understand, and solve problems in highly complex and turbulent environments. The concept is of recent origin. The American futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term in 1970 to define an emerging system of organization appropriate to a world of swiftly advancing technology and of societal impatience with the multilayered authority structure of the typical hierarchy. The Canadian author Henry Mintzberg more fully elaborated adhocracy as a type in 1979, arguing for its status as an important addition to the well-known forms, such as the simple structure, the professional bureaucracy, and the divisionalized form of organization.

Adhocracy tends to be far less hierarchical than other formal structures are. This is for two reasons. First, because adhocracy’s purpose is to address specific, often urgent problems that other organizational types have failed to solve, more decisional authority rests with highly trained technical experts whose reputations identify them as both skilled problem solvers and as unconventional. Second, the units and work groups of the adhocracy in which experts operate are fairly fluid. Adhocracy tolerates and sometimes even promotes ongoing changes in its subunits. Consequently, incumbent authority is accorded relatively less status in the adhocracy than in other formal organizations.

Examples of adhocracy include most project or matrix organizations. Among private-sector organizations, high-technology firms—particularly young firms facing fierce competition—are sometimes organized as adhocracies. The survival of these companies depends on the success of decision makers in predicting which shifts in market conditions really matter and what technologies and strategies need to be developed to respond quickly and effectively. Occasionally, among larger multidivisional organizations, one or more units may be constituted as adhocracies, whereas the other units, performing more-routinized tasks, remain more hierarchical. Although most of the Xerox Corporation was designed as a typical multidivisional firm, its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) was an adhocracy with a flat authority structure that functioned as a semiautonomous innovative research unit.

Public-sector adhocracies are not common, partly because of the emphasis placed on short-term accountability by political leaders. The managerial and technical units of adhocracies require a degree of autonomy that political masters seldom permit. However, important examples of adhocracy do exist in government. In its first dozen or so years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) functioned as an adhocracy. It was created in the wake of failures and bureaucratic turf fights by the branches of the U.S. military at the beginning of the space race. NASA was given considerable autonomy and a clear problem-solving mandate to land people on the Moon safely within a decade. Similarly, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created by the U.S. Congress as a “black box” research and development agency in the Pentagon (directly in response to Sputnik), is perhaps the best example of a federal agency in the United States designed as an adhocracy. DARPA’s core task is to identify emerging innovative technologies critical to national security. ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet, was one of its creations. Other examples of public-sector adhocracies include government-funded arts agencies such as Canada’s National Film Board.

As a design, adhocracy is malleable and relatively nonhierarchical, rendering it suitable for addressing the complex and ill-structured problems in its environment. As long as those to whom the adhocracy is accountable regard its tasks as necessarily ill-structured and critical, the unconventional nature of authority relationships and decision-making styles is tolerated. Over time, however, institutional leaders and governance boards often seek to reign in the discretion of decision makers in adhocracies. This generally happens when resources shrink, when the adhocracy makes serious errors, or when conditions in the adhocracy’s environment are regarded as either quiescent or no longer critical. In any case, the work of the adhocracy is usually risky, and it often invites controversy.