Organizational Adaptation

Andrew Sarta, Rodolphe Durand () and Jean-Philippe Vergne
Additional contact information
Rodolphe Durand: HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Organizational adaptation is equivocal. On the one hand, the concept is ubiquitous in management research and acts as the glue binding together the central issues of organizational change, performance, and survival. On the other hand, it lurks around in various guises (e.g., "fit," "alignment," "congruence," and "strategic change") studied from multiple theoretical streams (e.g., behavioral, resource-based, and institutional), and at different levels of analysis (e.g., organization- and industry-level). In a novel approach to reviewing 443 adaptation articles that leverages both computational and hand-coded analysis, we produce an interactive visual of the themes most studied by adaptation scholars. We inductively draw out a definition of adaptation as intentional decision-making undertaken by organizational members, leading to observable actions that aim to reduce the distance between an organization and its economic and institutional environments. We then review the literature across three main areas of inquiry and six theoretical perspectives that surfaced from our analysis and identify eleven difficulties that have hampered adaptation research in the past 50 years. Our review suggests ways to address these difficulties to enable future research to develop and cumulate.

Keywords: adaptation; fit; congruence; topic modeling; evolution; strategic change; performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-07-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Organizational Adaptation (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02896746

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().