Organization and Environment

Lawrence, P. R., & Lorsch, J. W. (1967). Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration. Harvard University Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1967

Link

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=6088

Cited from

economics_finance, organizational_management, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

7 citations across 7 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Coordination
  • A supply chain bottleneck is not a coordination problem if all actors are perfectly informed and motivated but the capacity is insufficient; it becomes a coordination problem if the bottleneck arises from unclear priorities or role conflicts—a contingency-based diagnostic Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) elaborated in their study of differentiation and integration in complex organizations.

    This sourceContingency study showing high-performing firms achieve both high differentiation and effective integration; supports the diagnosis that coordination problems arise from unclear priorities and role conflict across differentiated subunits.

• Division of Labor
  • The Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) finding that high-uncertainty environments demand both greater differentiation and greater integration simultaneously is the direct empirical instantiation of this counterfactual logic — the optimum partition fineness rises with environmental complexity, and so must the corresponding coordination investment.
• Environmental Coupling Strength
  • Platform ecosystems exhibit high environmental coupling to developer adoption and third-party innovation; vertically integrated firms exhibit lower coupling to external developer activity.

    This sourceEmpirical contingency study (plastics, food, container industries) showing that the degree of internal differentiation and integration required is determined by environmental uncertainty. SUPPORTS marker 191 (environmental coupling determines required degrees of internal differentiation and integration). [Venue note: published by Harvard Business School's Division of Research, not 'Harvard Business School Press'.]

• Layered Coordination & Oversight
  • The within-tier coordination mechanisms enabling lateral communication and decision-making at each layer
• Oversight Capacity
  • ? What factors shift the feasible span in this context (task complexity, subordinate capability, information asymmetry, stakes, interdependency)
• Systemic Fragmentation
  • The boundary-isolation phenomenon where organizational or architectural boundaries create separation between units' decision-making, information flow, and resource allocation
• Task Interdependence
  • Task-interdependence reasoning proceeds by asking

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.google.com/books/edition/Organization_and_Environment/VlJIAAAAMAAJ ×2

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