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
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...
Interorganizational Exchange Behavior in Marketing Channels: A Broadened Perspective
The scope of research on interorganizational exchange behavior in the marketing channels literature has been very limited, in part because of an incomplete conceptual framework....
Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design
This paper answers the question, “Why do organizations process information?” Uncertainty and equivocality are defined as two forces that influence information processing in orga...
The Political Economy Paradigm: Foundation for Theory Building in Marketing
This article presents an institutional, political economy paradigm in marketing as a complement to the presently prevailing microeconomic/marketing management concept. The latte...
Knowledge of the Firm, Combinative Capabilities, and the Replication of Technology
How should we understand why firms exist? A prevailing view has been that they serve to keep in check the transaction costs arising from the self-interested motivations of indiv...
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