Abstract
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.
Keywords
Perspective (graphical)Control (management)Resource dependence theoryHuman resource managementManagement control systemBusinessKnowledge managementManagementSociologyOperations managementEngineeringComputer scienceEconomics
Related Publications
The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective
Examines how external constraints affect organizations and how to design and manage organizations under such constraints. Taking a resource dependence perspective on organizatio...
Institutional Environments and Resource Dependence: Sources of Administrative Structure in Institutions of Higher Education
Two theoretical perspectives are combined to explain the pattern of administrative offices in public and private institutions of higher education.The first perspective, resource...
Is Management Really Generic?,
Four classes of organizations can be identified along the continuum between classical private profit-making firms and strictly governmental agencies: private for-profit, private...
Organization and Environment: A Typology of Adaptability and Structure
The citizen participation movement of the late 1960s has been followed by an increased interest in the relationship of public organizations to their environment.1 At the same ti...
Leadership and Organizational Performance: A Study of Large Corporations
Leadership influence in large complex organizations, though commonly assumed to be greatly significant, is normally not studied in terms of the variance accounted for in organiz...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2011
- Type
- book-chapter
- Pages
- 267-271
- Citations
- 14339
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
14339
OpenAlex
Cite This
Jeffrey Pfeffer,
Gerald R. Salancik
(2011).
External Control of Organizations: Resource Dependence Perspective.
, 267-271.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315701967-54
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781315701967-54