Evolution of the emery-trist model on the causal texture of organizational environments

Abstract

The Emery-Trist model on the causal texture of organizational environments is foundational and has been developed and tested over many decades. It provides key insights into building sustainable organizations. This model develops the concept of mutual influence between an organization and its environment and, by describing the texture of the environment, it helps define the adaptive strategy of an organization to the environment. Over the years, many contributions have been made but there is a lack of synthesis of the contributions, making it difficult to understand, and therefore implement or develop the current state of affairs. A systematic literature review of the model seemed necessary to trace its evolution over the years. We determined the main authors and main contributions, as well as the convergences and divergences between them. The resulting synthesis provides value to practitioners by identifying points of contention of which to be aware. Moreover, the identified divergences provide value to researchers as topics for further investigation. Integrating the concepts of this model in enterprise architecture approaches would help them to design or redesign sustainable organizations.

Date	13 Apr 2015
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	James Lapalme (Supervisor) & Don de Guerre (Co-supervisor)