Organizations and Environments

TLDR

The 1979 book *Organizations and Environments* sparked renewed interest in evolutionary explanations of organizational change, framing the key question of what conditions drive such change and continuing to serve as a foundational reference for scholars and practitioners. Aldrich integrates 13 chapters into an evolutionary model that defines the environment as concentrations of resources, power, and other organizations, and explains organizational change through variation, selection, retention, and struggle, enabling scholars to study founders’ contexts and firms’ survival trajectories.

Abstract

When Organizations and Environments was originally issued in 1979, it increased interest in evolutionary explanations of organizational change. Since then, scholars and practitioners have widely cited the book for its innovative answer to this question: Under what conditions do organizations change? Aldrich achieves theoretical integration across 13 chapters by using an evolutionary model that captures the essential features of relations between organizations and their environments. This model explains organizational change by focusing on the processes of variation, selection, retention, and struggle. The environment, as conceived by Aldrich, does not refer simply to elements out there-beyond a set of focal organizations-but rather to concentrations of resources, power, political domination, and most concretely, other organizations. Scholars using Aldrich's model have examined the societal context within which founders create organizations and whether those organizations survive or fail, rise to prominence, or sink into obscurity. A preface to the reprinted edition frames the utility of this classic for tomorrow's researchers and businesspeople.