INSIGHTS ON ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Part 1: Conceptualizing the Organizational Environment

The environment and the information about the organizational environment are relevant questions not only in the fields of environmental scanning, Competitive Intelligence and Scenario Planning (Aguilar, 1967; Choo, 1998, Gilad, Gilad, 1988; Fuld, 1985, Lesca, 1986; Lesca, Blanco, 1998, Day, Schoemaker, 2006, Schwartz, 1991; Godet, 1993; Heijden, 1996) but also in the organizational theory and in the domain of strategic management (Ansoff, 1975, 1984, Mintzberg et al., 1976, Mintzberg, 1984, Drucker, 1988, 1999, Porter, 1980, 1985, Bartlett, Ghoshal, 1991, Gibbons, Prescott,1996, Hamel, Prahalad, 1994; Thiétart, 1991).

The conceptualization of the organizational environment is not new in the strategic management literature (Ansoff, 1975, Porter, 1980, Smart, Vertinsky, 1984, Bartlett, Ghoshal, 1991).

Smart and Vertinsky (1984: 200) following previous work of other authors (Child, 1972, Steers, 1977, Duncan, 1972) state that the environment of a company can be conceptualized around two criteria: turbulence and complexity, where the turbulence relates to the change and rhythm of change of the environment, and the complexity is concerned with the number of factors in the environment that must be taken into consideration by the firm in a…