xxxi This book is about how organizational environments affect and constrain organization and how organizations respond to external constraints. It is also a guide to designing and managing organizations that are externally constrained.

p.13 Loose-coupling is an important safety device for organizational survival. If organizational actions were completely determined by every changing event, organizations would constantly confront potential disaster and need to monitor every change while continually modifying themselves. The fact that environmental impacts are felt only imperfectly provides the organization with some discretion, as well as the capability to act across time horizons longer than the time it takes for an environment to change.

p.18 One function of management, then, is to guide and control this process of manipulating the environment.

p.19 the manager seeks to enact or create an environment more favorable to the organization... organizational actions are adjusted to conform to the constraints imposed by the social context... Both images of the role of management imply a sensitivity to the social context in which the organization is embedded and an understanding of the relationship between the organization and its environment. Both, in other words, require the adoption of an external orientation to guide the understanding of organizational functioning.

p.26 Weick (1969) and Allport (1962) have described the process of organizing as one in which behavior becomes predictable and cyclical-structured.

p.30 "It is vital to note that it is behaviors, not persons, that are interstructured" (Weick, 1969:46).

p.70 System connectedness, then, is a substitute for concentration in that both assure predictability and provide increasingly powerful levers for change.

p.72 The events of the world around us do not present themselves to us with neat labels and interpretations. Rather, we give meaning to the events. Weick has noted that environments are enacted... "...The human actor does not react to an environment, he enacts it"

p.72 Weick attributes his development of the enactment concept to Schutz's (1967) discussion of time and the development of meaning.

p.73 There are no meanings that the world gives to us as valid. There are only our created beliefs, more or less supported by what we consider as evidence, and held with more or less conviction or doubt. The meaning is created by the observer.

p.78 Organizations learn what portions of the environment to attend to through past experience.

p.84 We have argued that the effective organization is one which responds to the demands from its environment according to its dependence on the various components of the environment. We presented this as a model which could predict organizational behavior... This model also serves, however, as a framework for what the organization should do to ensure its survival and success. The extent to which such a model can serve as a guide to action is affected by the organization's own awareness of its environment and the manner in which it enacts that environment.

p.95 influencing organizations can develop prior estimates of their probable success and use these to guide their behavior

p.106 Confronted by powerful external organizations, organizational adaptation requires managing the interdependencies themselves, as avoidance may no longer be possible.

p.106 There are two broadly defined contingent adaptive responses - the organization can adapt and change to fit environmental requirements, or the organization can attempt to alter the environment so that it fits the organization's capabilities.