Managing Environmental Demands: Adaptation and Avoidance

Abstract

The External Control of Organizations explores how external constraints affect organizations and provides insights for designing and managing organizations to mitigate these constraints. All organizations are dependent on the environment for their survival. As the authors contend, it is the fact of the organizations dependence on the environment that makes the external constraint and control of organizational behavior both possible and almost inevitable. Organizations can either try to change their environments through political means or form interorganizational relationships to control or absorb uncertainty. This seminal book established the resource dependence approach that has informed so many other important organization theories.