The External Control of Organizations

This work 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. It contends that it is the fact of the organization’s dependence on the environment that makes the external constraint and control of organizational behaviour 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.

Author Biography

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His recent publications include The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action and Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People. The late Gerald R. Salancik was the [title] at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University at the time of his death in [year].