Environments and Organizations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Environments and Organizations - Essay Example The art is in finding equilibrium between the two and that is the strategy. With this perception, strategist proceeds to find successful combinations of the organization/environment through strategy. This paradigm has been challenged by Smirchich and Stubbart (1985) who claim that current theories wrongly perceive that environments dictate strategies and that environments themselves are a creation of actions of organizations. They argue that all actions by all people in the organization contribute to the development of the environment. This is almost diagonally opposite thinking. They break the existing assumption that organization is entrenched in and confined to the environment. Ordinarily, strategists make imaginary linkages between events, objectives, and activities and create the environment. But for Smirchich and Stubbart both the environment and the organization are results of what they term as â€Å"enactment†. They support this radical thinking by stating that the soc ial interactions of the important members of the organization produce both the organization and the environment. This novel virtual framework simulates and creates the environment. Resultantly it is the patterns of activities that are labeled as organizations and environments and paves the way to find new strategies. It becomes the job of the strategist to find meaning and interpretations of these activities or enactments to determine strategies. The enactment theory decidedly discards the idea of a concrete, material organization/environment nexus and adopts a socially created symbolic world (Winch 1958). There is no such thing as an industry and it is the pattern of activities that end up as manufacturing or distribution.This gives rise to new methodologies of managing in the enacted world. The managers do not set objectives; rather they seek answers to questions like what to do and where to go. This creativity forms the strategy by thinking out of the box.