The original Aston studies of organizations established very strong correlations between size (measured by number of employees) and a number of dimensions or organization stucture (Pugh et al., 1969). Many of the Aston group's findings have been found to be capable of replication; replicability has been established in both the. context of similar samples of British organizations (Pugh and Hinings, 1976) and also cross-culturally (Hickson and McMillan, 1981). This paper analyses data on a selection of structural dimensions drawn from the National replication of 82 organizations (Child, 1973) which were obtained from the Aston Databank at the ESRC Data Archive in the U.K.
The analysis reported here focuses upon the three Structuring of Activities dimensions, i.e. Function Specialization, Overall Standardization and Overall Formalization, and in addition, Overall Role Specialization. In the original Aston study (Pugh et al., 1968) the three dimensions of structuring of Activities were found to constitute a single factor following a factor analysis. Functional Specialization refers to the number of specialized activities within an organization, while Overall Role Specialization denotes the number of specialized subtasks, i.e. the amount of specialization within each functional activity. Standardization refers to the extent to which organizational procedures are routinized. Formalization refers to "the extent .to which rules, procedures, instructions and communications are written" (Pugh et al., 1968, p. 75).