After working through this chapter you should be able to:

• identify and explain key contingencies affecting the structure and design of leisure service organizations

• identify basic organizational structures in leisure services

• understand the principles of organizational structure and design

• discuss how structure and design impact on members and performance of leisure service organizations.

Prior to discussing structure and design, it is worth reminding ourselves what organizations are and what they do. Beardshaw and Palfreman (1991: 25) view organizations as entities which exist principally by selling goods and services. They also classify them using typical organizational objectives; for example, in the case of trading organizations: profit maximization ... brand leadership, market domination, and corporate growth (ibid.: 28).

These perspectives alert us to basic issues of organizational function (selling), product (goods and services) and strategy (brand leadership and so on). However, in terms of organizational behaviour, these notions are less useful due to their narrowness of scope. Organizational behaviour focuses on people within firms and how they perceive the world. Robbins (1998: 2) provides a succinct and more appropriate definition: [An organization is a] consciously co-ordinated social unit, composed of two or more people, that functions on a relatively continuous basis to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

For our purpose, we can take Robbins s social unit and to achieve a common goal as people working together in the organization to produce and provide a composite product . This is simple enough but gives the false and...