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Chapter 8: Managing Organization-Environment Relations
In this final chapter of Part II, we are moving our level of analysis to another, broader level. Here, we are turning our attention to theories of organization that help us understand and affect the relationship between the organization and the wider environment in which it operates. In his exploration of institutional leadership, Philip Selznick remarks the following:
When institutional leadership fails, it is perhaps more often by default than by positive error or sin; and the institution drifts, exposed to vagrant pressures, readily influenced by short-run opportunistic trends.1
In part, the rationale for including this topic is reflected in Selznick's attention to “critical” or strategic decisions that are related to the extent to which the “vagrant pressures” he ...