Organizational Environment Revisited: A Conceptual Review and Integration

Abstract

Innumerable books and articles state that "the environment" is important to organizations and merits attention, as it is thought to influence organizations' actions as well as outcomes. Still, little agreement exists on what the environment is and how to apprehend it. This paper presents a review of four different perspectives in organization-environment research: the adaptive, the resource-dependence, the cognitive, and the population-ecology perspectives. All perspectives present assumptions about environmental structure, sources of environmental change, level of analysis, and so forth, but they also imply different meta-theoretical assumptions that constitute distinct frames of references. In this paper, the author suggests that the ideas in the realist paradigm in strategy research, the logic of appropriateness, and high general applicability and prescriptive value contribute to explaining the dominant position of the adaptive perspective. It is further argued that viewing "environment" from only one angle is too limited a conceptualization, and constructivism is suggested to be a feasible avenue for combining and integrating characteristics from different perspectives in order to overcome limitations with a single-frame approach.