Where does formalization collide?

The degree to which an organization's rules, procedures, job duties, and channels of communication are written down and made standard, so that behaviour is governed by explicit documents rather than by personal discretion. Pugh, Hickson, Hinings, and Turner's 1968 Dimensions of Organization Structure, from the Aston studies, treated formalization as one of the core structural dimensions and scored it by counting how many of a firm's activities were fixed in written form. Here the referent is a measurable property of a workplace, a matter of how much is put on paper, not a way of axiomatizing a theory or a policy of pulling informal business into the law.[1]

Unit

One firm's structure, scored by how much is set in writing

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by counting written documents, manuals, job descriptions, and standardized procedures, often as a summed structural score

The act of restating a theory, argument, or proof in a precise artificial language, with an explicit set of axioms and mechanical rules of inference, so that each step can be checked without appeal to intuition or ordinary words. This is the meaning at the heart of Hilbert's early twentieth-century program, and Avigad and Harrison's 2014 Formally verified mathematics reviews how whole proofs are now written in such languages and checked by machine. Here the referent is a symbolic reconstruction of reasoning itself, an ideal of total explicitness, not the amount of paperwork in a firm or the legal registration of informal trade.[2]

Unit

One theory or proof rendered in a formal language of axioms and rules

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by whether every step follows from stated axioms under fixed inference rules, and today verified by proof assistants

The process of moving economic activity, firms, workers, or land holdings out of the unregistered informal economy and into the legal and regulated one, through registration, titling, taxation, and the protection of formal contracts. La Porta and Shleifer's 2014 Informality and Development examines why so many firms in poor countries stay informal and what registering them does and does not achieve, engaging a debate that de Soto's work on titling informal property helped to frame. Here the referent is a change in the legal status of real economic actors, a policy question about who is inside the law, not a structural score for one firm or the axiomatizing of a theory.[3]

Unit

A firm, worker, or land parcel moved from informal to legally registered status

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tracked by rates of business registration, land titling, tax enrolment, and the share of activity that is legally recorded