p.575 the strategic choice perspective (Child 1972, 1997; Miles and Snow 1978, 1994; Thompson
1967) assumes that organizations have the discretion and the strategic capacity to select, enact, and shape their
environments. In addition strategic choice theory views interaction with the environment as the source of
new opportunities and strategic alternatives for repositioning the firm (Child 1972). Hrebiniak and Joyce (1985), Khandwalla
(1977), Mintzberg (1979), and many other neo-contingency theorists assert that adaptation is a dynamic process subject
to both managerial action and environmental forces. The implications of strategic choice theories for firm strategy
are that management should take into account the multiple ways in which organizations interact with their environments through
the process of mutual adaptation between the organization and its environmental domain. Specifically, managers must select
the environment in which the firm should compete, design the organization structure that best fits this environment, actively
shape and enact this environment, determine the performance criteria for measuring success, and design the strategies which
will maximize organization performance.
p.579 Advances in organizational studies will derive from the recognition that adaptation and selection are not
wholly opposing forces but are fundamentally interrelated and coevolving.
p.580 Weick (1979) conceptualizes a view of organizing in which organization members are seen as enacting and
socially constructing their environment. Weick thus represents the environment simultaneously as endogenous and exogenous.
p.580-581 Aldrich (1979) outlined an evolutionary theory based on processes of variation, selection, and retention.
p.581 'The Red Queen effect' (Beinhocker 1997; Kauffman 1995; Van Valen 1973) after the comment to Alice,
'It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place' (Carroll 1946).
