The Vortical Environment: The Fifth in the Emery-Trist Levels of Organizational Environments

The paper develops a conceptual scheme that has not been developed to extend the Emery-Trist levels of organizational environments to afifth level consistent with premises laid in their milestone paper (Emery & Trist, 1965). The mounting contemporary evidence that can be observed in the salience of maladaptive responses to turbulent environments is the second reason for undertaking this challenge. More specifically, it is argued that the prevalence of stalemate, polarization, and monothematic dogmatism, the second-order maladaptive responses to the turbulent environment, leads to a frozen or a clinched order of connectedness as well as that of unevenly dynamic turbulent conditions. This approach facilitates the articulation of a different causal texture of an organizational environment than the previous four levels (placid random, placid clustered, disturbed reactive, and turbulent).

[1]  Danny Miller,et al.  Evolution And Revolution: A Quantum View Of Structural Change In Organizations , 1982 .

[2]  E. Trist.  The environment and system-response capability , 1980 .

[3]  Charles Smith,et al.  A Dissipative Structure Model of Organization Transformation , 1985 .

[4]  Milton Rokeach,et al.  The Open and Closed Mind , 1961 .

[5]  D. Whetten.  Organizational Decline: A Neglected Topic in Organizational Science1 , 1980 .

[6]  Kathleen M. Eisenhardt,et al.  Managing organizational decline: Lessons from Atari , 1986 .

[7]  J. Metcalfe.  SELF REGULATION, CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND PREVENTIVE MEDICINE: THE EVOLUTION OF U.K. BANK SUPERVISION , 1982 .

[8]  Shirley Terreberry.  The Evolution of Organizational Environments , 1968 .

[9]  N. Tichy,et al.  The essentials of strategic change management. , 1983, The Journal of business strategy.

[10]  P. Nystrom,et al.  Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organization , 1976 .

[11]  Fred Emery,et al.  Futures we are in , 1977 .

[12]  E. E. Jones,et al.  Polarized appraisals of out-group members. , 1980 .

[13]  E. Trist,et al.  The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments , 1965 .

[14]  Danny Miller,et al.  Common syndromes of business failure , 1977 .

[15]  L. Hirschhorn.  THE STALEMATED AGENCY:: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE AND A PRACTICAL PROPOSAL , 1979 .

[16]  T. Turner.  Zaire: Stalemate and Compromise , 1985 .

[17]  I. Prigogine,et al.  From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences , 1982 .

[18]  John W. Selsky,et al.  Hyperturbulence and the Emergence of Type 5 Environments , 1984 .

[19]  S. Fiske,et al.  Social Psychology , 2019, Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences.

[20]  Eric Trist,et al.  Paradigms for Societal Transition , 1986 .

[21]  Russell L. Ackoff,et al.  On purposeful systems , 1972 .

[22]  Alastair Donald Crombie.  Planning for turbulent social fields , 1972 .

[23]  A. Angyal.  Foundations for a science of personality , 1943 .

[24]  M. Cantley.  Scale, protectionism and European integration: the structural dynamics of strategic control in a turbulent field , 1981 .

[25]  J. L. Metcalfe,et al.  Systems Models, Economic Models and the Causal Texture of Organizational Environments: An Approach to Macro-Organization Theory , 1974 .