Abstract
For the past several years, environmental analysis has been a popular topic in the management literature. Under titles such as environmental analysis, environmental scanning, issues analysis, issues management, and others, a variety of published materials has discussed the desirability of the activity, and how it could or should be accomplished.1 Two assumptions are explicit or implicit in many of these works: that the function will increase in importance over time,2 and that there is merit in organizing the activity as a free-standing, real time staff function within the firm (either in concert with strategic planning,3 or in a unit outside the normal planning process, cutting across organizational hierarchies).4
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References
For instance: F. Aquilar (1967) Scanning the Business Environment (New York: Macmillan Company);
H. Ansoff (1979) Strategic Management (New York: John Wiley and Sons);
I. Wilson (1974) ‘Socio-political Forecasting: A New Dimension to Strategic Planning’, Michigan Business Review, pp. 15–25, July;
E. Segev (1979) ‘Analysis of the Business Environment’, Management Review, 63, 58–61, August;
M.J. Kami (1976) ‘Planning in Times of Unpredictability’, Columbia Journal of World Business, Summer.
Ansoff, H. (1980) ‘Strategic Issue Management’, Strategic Management Journal, 1 (2), 131–48; Kami, op. cit.;
S. Jain (1984) ‘Environmental scanning in US Corporations’, Long Range Planning, 17 (2), 117–128.
Wilson, I. (1983) ‘Evaluating the Environment: Social and Political Factors’, Working Paper, SRI International;
R. Ewing, ‘Modeling the Process’, in J. Magelschmidt (ed.) The Public Affairs Handbook (New York: AMACON, 1982).
Ansoff (1980), op. cit.
Wall Street Journal, 8 August (1981); P. Thomas (1980) ‘Environmental Scanning — the State of the Art’, Long Range Planning, 13, February.
This Business of Issues: Coping with the Company’s Environments, Conference Board (1979).
L. Fahey and W. King (1977) ‘Environmental Scanning in Corporate Planning’, Business Horizons, pp. 61–71, August.
J. Diffenbach (1983) ‘Corporate Environment Analysis in Large US Corporations’, Long Range Planning, 16 (3), 107–16.
C. Stubbart (1982) ‘Are Environmental Scanning Units Effective?’, Long Range Planning, 15, 139–45.
Stubbart, op. cit.
Stubbart, op. cit., p. 144.
T. Lenz and J. Engledow (1984) ‘Environmental Analysis and Strategic Decision Making: A Field Study of Selected “Leading-Edge” Corporations’, Working Paper, Strategy Research Center, Columbia University.
The categorization (irregular, regular and continuous) proposed by Fahey and King (op. cit.) is not helpful in discriminating among firms here, since, because of the manner of selection, all would be classified as continuous. The same basically applies to the ‘phases of evolution’ suggested by Jain (op. cit.). Further discussion of the latter is included below.
Lenz and Engeldow, op. cit.
See the discussion in Lenz and Engledow, op. cit.
Jain, op. cit.
It is unlikely that either of the figures covering numbers of personnel is totally accurate, given the difficulty of measuring shared duties, ambiguity in delimiting environmental analysis from other planning activities, and likelihood of other types of environmental analysis taking place in parts of the organization not uncovered by the interview process. Any bias introduced by these measurement difficulties is unlikely to be systematic, or to change the basic conclusion.
Ansoff (1980), op. cit.; M. Porter (1980) Competitive Strategy (New York: Free Press).
K. Weick (1979) The Social Psychology of Organizing (2nd edn) (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley).
J. Quinn (1980) Strategies for Change: Logical Incrementalism (Homewood, Illinois: Irwin).
T. Peters and R. Waterman (1982) In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper & Row).
Fahey and King, Stubbart, Diffenbach, all op. cit.
One interesting finding in the study was the ambiguity in, or, in some cases, the complete lack of attention to defining ‘the environment’, though analysing the environment was the task at hand. There was no consensus between organizations and little consensus within organizations as to how to approach the problem of describing the organization’s environment and delimiting the units’ domain for search. This ambiguity almost certainly causes misunderstandings in expectations for the activity, confusion in the use of terminology, and lack of efficiency and effectiveness in analysis. There is a need for direct attention to the question of how to conceptualize the firm’s environment. (See the discussion in T. Lenz and J. Engledow (1983) ‘Alternative “Models” for Analyzing Organizational Environments: Theoretical Issues and Administrative Implications’, Working Paper, Strategy Research Center, Columbia University.)
Ansoff (1980) op. cit.
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© 1989 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Engledow, J.L., Lenz, R.T. (1989). Whatever Happened to Environmental Analysis?. In: Asch, D., Bowman, C. (eds) Readings in Strategic Management. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20317-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20317-8_9
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