Decreasing Organizational Size: To Untangle or Not to Untangle?

This article presents comments on an article published in a previous issue that discussed the effects that work force decline has on organizational structures. In that article the authors presented two models that outlined the results that declining financial resources and a decreasing work force has on the structure of an organization. This article suggests that their argument about the long-term influences of work force decline needs to be reexamined. The author notes that the process of organizational decline is more complex than suggested in the previous work and attempts to show that the process involves more than just a reduction in the scale of operations. He also asserts that the decline process is not simply the reverse of the growth process, as is suggested in the original work.