Three essays on the organization - environment interface

Abstract: The environment is considered to be of importance to organizations, albeit for different reasons. This thesis presents an introduction to the concept of organizational environment and will provide the reader with a review of four different perspectives in organization - environment thinking. The perspectives reviewed are the adaptive, the resource-dependence, the cognitive, and the population-ecology perspective. These four perspectives are compared and contrasted on seven different dimensions, in an attempt to identify their similarities and differences. There then follows a discussion on how these perspectives relate to the appended papers, the evolution of these papers, and a summary of the papers. Finally, suggestions for future research are presented. There are three appended papers. The first paper, named Characteristics in information processing approaches, aims to describe and compare different information processing approaches. The purpose of the paper is to identify similarities and differences in different terms used to describe information acquisition, relate them to and compare them with each other, but also to identify their underlying concepts and the course of events they represent. The approaches addressed include environmental scanning, business intelligence, and information management. The second paper is entitled Information use in strategic decision-making. This paper addresses the issue of information use in decisions characterized as strategic. The method employed is a case study, where four decisions are highlighted. By addressing questions such as: Why is information used? What kind of information does management use? How do they obtain it? And finally, where do they obtain it?, the study provides the reader with an insight into management information behavior when taking strategic decisions. The third paper, The influence of environmental scanning on innovation performance, addresses the question of weather or not those firms that are better at managing external information also are better innovators. Data were collected by means of a mail survey, and the results show that a positive relationship exists between environmental scanning and innovation performance. Moreover, sharing information across functions/departments as well as using environmental information in decision-making concerning new product/service development were also found to correlate positively with innovation performance. The results also show that firms that are skilful at collecting, sharing and making use of information when deciding on new products/services are those that exhibit the highest degree of innovation performance in comparison with others.