Conclusions
Up to this point, I have primarily been setting the stage for the challenging conditions facing organizations of the 2020s. The stage has been set by descriptions and predictions regarding organizational size and complexity that come from more than 40 years of analysis – and from the major organizational theorists and researchers of these four decades. It is now time, in the next four essays, for us to turn our attention to more recent organizational analyses that have been offered by the new theorists and researchers who are addressing many of the same issues concerning size and complexity. It seems that these earlier analyses were quite prescient. Today, the matter of appropriate size is even more pressing for the digital age has allowed some organizations to remain small and nibble, while others have become quite large while dominating a specific field or even several fields thanks to the Internet. Furthermore, organizations are becoming even more complex, as they become agile in many instances by taking on multiple forms and engaging in multiple collaborations with other organizations.
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