(Not) by chance? An application of Assembly Theory to infer non-randomness in organizational design

Assembly theory (AT) (Sharma et al., Nature 622:321–328, 2023) is a novel and ambitious perspective on the emergence of larger structures from smaller structures in the physical realm. It offers formal tools to infer the development trajectories of observed structures under some theory-driven assumptions. By mapping it onto the micro-structural perspective of organizations, we show how AT can also help us model organizational development and estimate the extent to which an observed organizational structure is (un)likely to have arisen by chance. We apply these to illustrate how we can infer the extent of non-randomness in the development history of an organization based on its current structure. We note theoretical and empirical implications for the study of organization design.