Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in radical decentralization have gained mainstream consideration, giving rise to a need for new theory and new research. This paper reviews the literature on less-hierarchical organizing and identifies three categories of research: post-bureaucratic organizations, humanistic management and organizational democracy. Despite this extensive prior work, scholarly understanding of radical decentralization remains limited. Using the term self-managing organizations to capture efforts that radically decentralize authority in a formal and systematic way throughout the organization, we set forth a research agenda to better understand less-hierarchical organizing at its limits.

长期以来，尽管避开了学者和实践者的关注，但对避免传统管理等级制度而彻底地将权力下放的组织的迷恋一直存在。然而，近来，激进分权的组织实验已经获得了主流的考虑，从而需要新的理论和新的研究。本文回顾了关于低等级组织的文献，并确定了三类研究：后官僚组织，人本管理和组织民主。尽管进行了广泛的先前工作，但学术界对激进分权的理解仍然有限。使用术语“自我管理的组织” 为了捕捉在整个组织中以正式和系统的方式从根本上将权力下放的工作，我们制定了研究议程，以更好地理解在其极限范围内的低等级组织。