Intraorganizational Ecology of Strategy Making and Organizational Adaptation: Theory and Field Research

TLDR

The study discusses how induced and autonomous strategic processes relate to four modes of organizational adaptation. The paper introduces an intraorganizational ecological perspective on strategy making, exploring how internal and external selection jointly explain organizational change and survival. The authors use a field study of Intel’s corporate strategy evolution to illustrate and refine the ecological framework. The study resolves paradoxes of structural inertia and strategic reorientation, proposing that consistently successful firms have top management that simultaneously develop induced and autonomous processes, and that successful reorientations are preceded by internal experimentation and selection through the autonomous process.

Abstract

This paper presents an intraorganizational ecological perspective on strategy making, and examines how internal selection may combine with external selection to explain organizational change and survival. The perspective serves to illuminate data from a field study of the evolution of Intel Corporation's corporate strategy. The data, in turn, are used to refine and deepen the conceptual framework. Relationships between induced and autonomous strategic processes and four modes of organizational adaptation are discussed. Apparent paradoxes associated with structural inertia and strategic reorientation arguments are elucidated and several new propositions derived. The paper proposes that consistently successful organizations are characterized by top managements who spend efforts on building the induced and autonomous strategic processes, as well as concerning themselves with the content of strategy; that such organizations simultaneously exercise induced and autonomous processes; and that successful reorientations in organizations are likely to have been preceded by internal experimentation and selection processes effected through the autonomous process.