Strategies of Organizational Survival: The Case of a National Program for Educational Reform

A small number of case studies describing how organizations adapt to changing or hostile environments by means of goal adaptation, selection of membership and audience, and reinforcement of organizational structure has accumulated. (For example, see Clark, 1956, 1960; Gusfield, 1955; Marris & Rein, 1967, Messinger, 1955; Moynihan, 1969; Selznick, 1949; Sills, 1957; Watson, 1968; Zald, 1970.) This literature is comprehensive, in that most aspects of the problem have been considered by one writer or another; however, at least two critical dimensions have not been given the full attention they deserve. First, with notable exceptions (e.g., Moynihan, 1969; Selznick, 1949; Zald, 1970), these studies concentrate on a single organization or view large sets of organizations as a collective, with only incidental attention to their internal dynamics. Analysis of interorganizational relationships would, however, illuminate the processes by which organizations are able to adapt and survive. Second, recent syntheses of political, economic, and sociological perspectives (Hirschman, 1970) bring into focus the essentially political nature of the process by which goals and structure are adapted to external and internal constraints. Zald (1970), for one, has demonstrated the utility of focusing on the "political economy" of organizations; i.e., the interplay of power and goals and productive exchange systems. This approach calls attention to the importance of external funding sources, internal allocations of resources, internal and external group conflict, and dominating elites.