This is an advanced graduate-level course that aims at providing students with the opportunity to understand the concept of organizations as inherently being open social systems, which interact on a continuous basis with the external environment. This is facilitated by helping students to appreciate the important effects of the contextual factors (i.e. external environment, organization’s goals and strategy, organization’s size, organizational technology, and an organization’s culture) upon the design of the organization, represented by its structural factors. Moreover, this course provides a view as to the recent trends in designing organizations, which are primarily triggered by the changing conditions in today’s dynamic and uncertain external environment affecting all types of organizations.