The Nature of Organizational Mechanisms

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.