The Organizational Environment Dimensions Revisited: Analysis of the Contemporary Context

Abstract

In this paper, we survey, classify and synthesize different theoretical concepts and empirical studies that examine the nature of organizational environment. In the beginning, we present the classification made by Burgeois (1980) which differentiates three categories of research streams in the study of organizational environment. We build theoretical framework on each of these categories by presenting contributions of various scholars and ultimately focus on two elementary attributes of organizational environment: simple-complex and stable-dynamic dimensions. After some in-depth investigation of the already obtained results on these dimensions, we propose the concept in which the simple-complex dimension consists of intensity, frequency and speed of changes within the environment and stable-dynamic dimension, which contains the parameters of a number of elements, their interdependence and complexity. The paper ends with the explanation of environmental discontinuity concept in contemporary context, and some consideration of organizations' responses to the changing nature of organizational environment