Jeffrey Pfeffer quote: “The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational…”

“The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

2003; 39
The External Control of Organizations, 1978

“[Key Account Management is] the extent to which an organization achieves better relationship outcomes for its Key Accounts than for its average accounts.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "A configurational perspective on key account management", 2002, p. 46

“In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design.”

Richard M. Burton (1939)

Richard M. Burton, ‎Børge Obel, ‎Gerardine DeSanctis (2011). Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. p. 3

“In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design.”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Richard M. Burton ‎Børge Obel, ‎Gerardine DeSanctis (2011). Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. p. 3

“A population ecology perspective on organization-environment relations is proposed as an alternative to the dominant adaptation perspective. The strength of inertial pressures on organizational structure suggests the application of models that depend on competition and selection in populations of organizations. Several such models, as well as issues arising in attempts to apply them to the organization-environment problem, are discussed.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 929; Article abstract

“All large organizations have an internal power struggle over the goals and resources of the organization…. In the largest firms, there are two bases of control : formal ownership and authority. Those who own the firm control by virtue of ownership. Authority relations embedded in the organizational structure legitimate how managers can control organizations.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 10 ; As cited in: François L'Italien, BÉHÉMOTH CAPITAL. Contribution à une théorie dialectique de la financiarisation de la grande corporation. Université Laval, 2012. p. 147 (Many of the following quotes came from this source)

“The history of organization theory contrasts with the history of managerial thought. When people began to compose texts about organized activities, between 2,000 and 3,000 years before the Christian era (BCE), they focused on managerial practices rather than on organizations as such. Several writers proposed general principles for managerial practice before 1000 BCE, so one can say that theories about managing have existed for at least 3000 years. However, these writings often said nothing about the organizational contexts in which managing was to occur. When the writers did make statements about organizations, they did not generalize. They wrote about specific organizations.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: "The Origins of Organizational Theory," 2005, p. 143

“We find support for the contingency logic, suggesting that effective organization design has to take into account the underlying characteristics of the firm's knowledge base.”

Jonas Ridderstråle (1966) Swedish business theorist

Julian Birkinshaw, Robert Nobel, and Jonas Ridderstråle. "Knowledge as a contingency variable: do the characteristics of knowledge predict organization structure?." Organization science 13.3 (2002): 274-289.

“Active loose coupling occurs when a subsystem of an organization is more tightly coupled to an environmental sector than other subsystems, and a feedback loop connects environmental conditions with organizational responses. A feedback loop is present when an organizational mechanism for monitoring the environment exists, and when the state of the environment (or intended target of the organization's action) is compared to some desired state by members of the organization.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 85

“Hannan and Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals by the intervention of individuals.”

John H. Freeman (1944–2008) (1944-2008) US-American sociologist and organizational theorist

Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman. Organizational ecology. Harvard University Press, 1993; Abstract.

“The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded.”

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