This chapter builds on the discussions in Chapter 4 about the bridging between organization design (design as a noun) and organization designing (design as a verb). Based on the key precepts of Giddens’ (1984) social theory, it is argued that the traditional notion of organizational structure can be split into the concepts of structure and structuration and that while ‘structure’ is relatively stable, ‘structuration’ is ever changing. This allows us to talk of ‘interactive structure’ as a type of structure that changes with interaction and where the emphasis is on the monitoring of interactions between human and non-human actors, by means of multiple types of traces. Thus, rather than controlling people, with interactive structure, organizations are better able to deal with the disconnect between the formal and the informal sides of organization and take full advantage of the organizational capital to be found in one of the key characteristics of informal organization, i.e. improvisation.
