Scarcity and Environmental Stress in Public organizations

Abstract

Some observers, including many "doomsday" futurists, have contended that a pre dominant characteristic of future society will be extreme scarcity. Viewing this as sumption of extreme scarcity as plausible (though not necessarily most probable), this conjectural essay considers some of the possible effects of sustained scarcity, particu larly sharp declines in public spending and public employment, on public organization behavior. The focus is on the effects of scarcity on four types of strategic choices in public organizations: domain selection, development and deployment of technology, organization structure, and organization process. Arguments are developed that public organizations facing sustained scarcity could be expected to: constram their domain definition, allow domarn selection to dictate technology, seek clientele suited to existing technologies, and, m general, take actions that will ensure that existing technologies are employed at capacity. Further, we argue that narrow efficiency criteria will become paramount and will give rise to more formal, centralized, and rigid organization structures and a habituation of organizational responses to environ mental change.

Organizational Decline and Innovation: A Contingency Framework

“…We can find additional confirmation of the model's general implication that organizational decline increases rigidity in a wide variety of studies, particularly those focusing on public sector organizations and universities. Researchers have suggested that organizational decline leads to an efficiency orientation (Cameron, 1983;D'Aveni, 1989b), an internal focus (Whetten, 1981), restricted domain definition (Bozeman & Slusher, 1979), reduced innovativeness (Cameron, , and increased workforce homogeneity (Greenhalgh, 1983). Scholars argue that these outcomes increase rigidity and reduce an organization's capacity to innovate in response to organizational decline.…”

Organizational Decline Research Review: Challenges and Issues for a Future Research Agenda

“…According to , the works published during this period show three theoretical foundations for organizational decline: the literature on organizational environment highlights the importance of organizations having control over critical environmental resources, represented by the works of Aldrich (1979); the literature on crisis management addresses the impact of environmental discontinuities in organizations, in the works of Starbuck et al (1978) and Smart and Vertinsky (1977); and the literature on the management of uncertainty, in the works of Thompson (1967). Other works regarding this factor were Whetten (1980) on organizational life-cycles, articles on retrenchment (Whetten, 1981), the definition of a typology of decline (Zammuto & Cameron, 1985) and the difference between decline and stagnation (Bozeman & Slusher, 1979).…”

Politics and Administration: A Trichotomy?

“…Bozeman and Slusher (1979) also found that public organizations dominated by the managerial subsystem were similarly insensitive to the external environment, heaping "dysfunction upon dysfunction," continually searching for solutions of the same or a similar type in a form of paralysis which left them unable to produce new technological solutions to the problem. Overall, the literature suggests that the institutional component within public organizations has to be represented in order to achieve effective public control (Gruber 1984), and that underrepresentation of the technical subsystem can be literally a recipe for disaster (Romzek and Dubnick 1987).…”