Organizations are viewed as systems of governance. A distinction is made between formal structure and governance structure, and a network perspective is adopted to investigate the correspondence between them. This paper reports on an exploratory investigation of governance in an R&D laboratory in which decision-making power is found to be concentrated in an elite cadre of managers and experts who are also centrally located in the interaction network. The article discusses the utility of the concept of governance in enriching our perspective on organizational structuring.
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