Fred Emery: Environment

“A great deal of the thinking here has been influenced by cybernetics and information theory, though this has been used as much to extend the scope of closed-system as to improve the sophistication of open system formulations. It was von Bertalanffy (1950) who, in terms of the general transport equation which he introduced, first fully disclosed the importance of openness or closedness to the environment as a means of distinguishing living organisms from inanimate objects.”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 22.

Thinking

“The further development of the open system thinking propounded by von Bertalanffy and Prigogine requires us to characterize the environments within which open systems are functioning. Four levels of environmental organization can be distinguished in terms of their causal texturing…
Coming out from an academic cocoon to work at the Tavistock Institute in London I found myself trying to comprehend the behavior of very large organizations in the face of very devastating winds of change… The conceptual developments in that paper have continued to play a considerable role in my subsequent thinking.”

Fred Emery

F. E. Emery (1980) in " This Week’s Citation Classic http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1980/A1980KT80900001.pdf" in: CC. Nr. 52. Dec 29, 1980. p. 292: Emery reflecting on his 1963 article "The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments" with Eric Trist.

Behavior , Thinking , Change

“More complicated, but still a placid environment, is that which can be characterized in terms of clustering: goals and noxiants are not randomly distributed but band together in certain ways. This may be called the placid, clustered environment.”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 28-29.

Way

“The simplest type of environmental texture is that in which goals and noxiants ("goods" and "bads") are relatively unchanging in themselves and randomly distributed. This may be called the placid, randomized environment.”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 28.

“A main problem in the study of organizational change is that the environmental contexts in which organizations exist are themselves changing, at an increasing rate and towards increasing complexity. This point, in itself, scarcely needs laboring. Nevertheless, characteristics of organizational environments demand consideration for their own sake if there is to be an advancement of understanding in the behavioral sciences of a great deal that is taking place under the impact of technological change, especially at the present time”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 21.

Behavior , Understanding , Problem , Study

“Yet more complex are the environments we have called turbulent fields. In these, dynamic processes, which create significant variances for the component organizations, arise from the field itself.”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 30.

“The next level of causal texturing we have called the disturbed reactive environment. It may be compared with Ashby's ultra-stable system or the economists' oligopolic market.”

Fred Emery

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 29.

“Yet more complex are the environments we have called turbulent fields.”

Fred Emery

In these, dynamic processes, which create significant variances for the component organizations, arise from the field itself.
Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 30.

“The next level of causal texturing we have called the disturbed reactive environment.”

Fred Emery

It may be compared with Ashby's ultra-stable system or the economists' oligopolic market.
Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 29.