Large company: Made up of organizations or departments?
Rise to the top 3% as a developer or hire one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
--------------------------------------------------
Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: The World Wide Mind
--
Chapters
00:00 Large Company: Made Up Of Organizations Or Departments?
00:31 Accepted Answer Score 3
01:10 Answer 2 Score 0
01:21 Answer 3 Score 0
01:45 Thank you
--
Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...
--
Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
--
Tags
#wordchoice #vocabulary
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 3
In the context of Apple, I would agree that departments is the better word. HR is a department, as is Support.
Generally speaking, an entity can comprise several organizations, but in that case I would call that entity itself an organization (or, in case the entity is commercial, corporation). As a simple example, the UN is an organization, but so are its agencies such as the UNTSO and the WHO.
Looking at the Merriam-Webster definitions, I see that organization is an "association, society", while department is "a major division of a business". HR, Support, and iOS Development are certainly major divisions of Apple, but they can't be labeled as societies or associations in their own right.
ANSWER 2
Score 0
I think rather than using organization or department, IMHO the right term is functional groups.
ANSWER 3
Score 0
A company usually has departments; a large company may have divisions (which in turn have departments within them).
I think "department" and "division" have a stronger connotation of hierarchy than "organization" does. Organizations can be looser associations, while the engineering department has a definite reporting chain (to the CTO or whomever).