Stanford Business Classics – serie

Among the most widely cited books in the social sciences, The External Control of Organizations has long been required reading for any student of organization studies. The book, reissued on its 25th anniversary as part of the Stanford Business Classics series, includes a new preface written by Jeffrey Pfeffer, which examines the legacy of this influential work in current research and its relationship to other theories.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 organization's 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.

"Books and articles come and go, endlessly. But a few do stick, and this book is such a one. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process broke fresh ground in the understanding of strategy at a time when thinking about strategy was still in its early days, and it has not been displaced since."—David J. Hickson, Emeritus Professor of International Management & Organization, University of Bradford School of ManagementOriginally published in 1978, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process became an instant classic, as it bridged the formerly separate fields of strategic management and organizational behavior. In this Stanford Business Classics reissue, noted strategy scholar Donald Hambrick provides a new introduction that describes the book's contribution to the field of organization studies. Miles and Snow also contribute new introductory material to update the book's central concepts and themes.Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process focuses on how organizations adapt to their environments. The book introduced a theoretical framework composed of a dynamic adaptive cycle and an empirically based strategy typology showing four different types of adaptation. This framework helped to define subsequent research by other scholars on important topics such as configurational analysis, organizational fit, strategic human resource management, and multi-firm network organizations.

Upon its publication in 1962, this book became one of the founding texts of organizational sociology. Bringing together diverse approaches, it presented a new focus of interest: the formal organization. Blau and Scott raised the level of analysis from attention solely on individual participants and work groups to a broader understanding of organizations as collective actors. In the book, the authors reviewed multiple types of studies—including case studies, experimental research, and surveys—and integrated them to define new central themes. They used their own empirical studies of two social welfare agencies to illustrate the ways in which varying organizational contexts shape work group and participant attitudes and activities. Formal Organizations served to integrate research on both formal and informal systems, authority and leadership, and stressed the importance of links to the wider environment. This reissue, which includes a new introduction by Scott, makes this seminal work accessible to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.