Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raymond E. Miles is Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He is currently writing a book on entrepreneurial strategies to be published by Stanford Business Books. Charles C. Snow is the Mellon Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Penn State University. He teaches in the areas of strategic management and international business.

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Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword to the Classic Edition Donald C. Hambrick............................................viiIntroduction to the Classic Edition............................................................xvPreface........................................................................................xxvI. Theory and Applications1. Introduction................................................................................32. The Process of Organizational Adaptation....................................................133. Defenders...................................................................................314. Prospectors.................................................................................495. Analyzers...................................................................................686. Reactors....................................................................................817. Applications of the Model...................................................................948. Management Theory Linkages to Organizational Strategy and Structure.........................1169. Mixed Strategies and Structures.............................................................13010. Conclusions and Extensions.................................................................152II. Industry Studies11. Strategy in a Single Industry: The Case of College Textbook Publishing.....................17112. Interindustry Comparisons of Strategy: Electronics and Food Processing.....................19313. Management and Strategy: The Case of the Voluntary Hospital................................214III. Overview of the Literature14. Prior Theory and Research..................................................................249Bibliography...................................................................................264Index..........................................................................................271

Chapter One

An organization is both an articulated purpose and an established mechanism for achieving it. Most organizations engage in an ongoing process of evaluating their purposes-questioning, verifying, and redefining the manner in which they interact with their environments. Effective organizations carve out and maintain a viable market for their goods or services. Ineffective organizations fail at this market alignment task. Organizations must also constantly modify and refine the mechanism by which they achieve their purposes-rearranging their structure of roles and relationships and their decision making and control processes. Efficient organizations establish mechanisms that complement their market strategy. Inefficient organizations struggle with these structure and process mechanisms.

For most organizations, the dynamic process of adjusting to environmental change and uncertainty-of maintaining an effective alignment with the environment while efficiently managing internal interdependencies-is enormously complex, encompassing myriad decisions and behaviors at several organization levels. Nonetheless, we believe that the complexity of the adjustment process can be penetrated: by searching for patterns in the behavior of organizations, one can describe and even predict the process of organizational adaptation. This book, which is based on our interpretation of the existing literature and continuing studies in four industries, provides a theoretical framework for portraying the adjustment or adaptive process, identifying its key variables, and defining their interrelationships.

More specifically, the framework presented in this book suggests some tentative answers to the following organizational and managerial questions:

To what extent and why do organizations within the same industry differ in their strategy, structure, and process? That is, what factors influence the decision to offer a narrow or broad line of products or ser vices, to structure the organization around functions or products, to centralize or disperse decision making and control, and so forth?

How is an organization's market strategy related to the structures and processes that management selects to pursue this strategy?

To what extent and why do organizations develop typical ways of responding to environmental change and uncertainty? Within a given industry, can persistent types of organizational behaviors be identified?

Can an organization's type be diagnosed and changed? What key variables, relationships, and characteristics must be altered if change is to be effective?

Does a particular type or form of organization require a specific style of management? How does the theory of management held by an organization's leaders enhance or inhibit the organization's ability to adapt to its environment?

Are existing models of organization strategy, structure, and process able to meet all environmental conditions? If not, can new organizational forms be constructed? What characteristics will these new forms have?

The answers we offer in this book are tentative in that we have no final proof of the validity of our theoretical framework, nor is such proof likely to become available. Any attempt to examine organizational adaptation is difficult since the process is both highly complex and changeable. Nevertheless, we believe it is important to develop conceptual models of the adaptive process and to examine empirically the behaviors employed by organizations as they adjust to their environments. Managers and students of management need a theory and vocabulary that deal with the organization as an integrated and dynamic whole-a model that takes into account the interrelationships among strategy, structure, and process.

The theoretical framework proposed in this book has two major elements: (1) a general model of the process of adaptation that describes the decisions needed by the organization to maintain an effective alignment with its environment, and (2) an organizational typology that portrays the different patterns of adaptive behavior used by organizations within a given industry or other grouping. The framework is used to describe and diagnose existing organizational behaviors and to prescribe alternative directions for change where necessary. Successful organizational change, however, requires another important element to be added to the framework-management theory. Organizations are limited in their choices of adaptive behavior to those which top management believes will allow the effective direction and control of human resources. Therefore, at several points, managers' theories about how people can and should be managed are brought into our discussion.

THEORY AND RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS

The cornerstones of both the research summarized in this book and our ongoing studies consist of three pivotal ideas that were introduced and developed by a number of other authors. Although these ideas did not necessarily grow out of studies of organizational adaptation, we have nonetheless found them useful in our own research.

Organizations act to create their environments. Until recently, much organizational research has been based on the assumption that organizations respond in predictable ways to the conditions which surround them, adjusting their purpose and shape to meet...