Organizational Adaptations to Changing Cultural Contingencies*

Abstract
An integrated conceptual framework acceptable across different disciplines and theoretical perspectives is presented. The scheme promotes one aspect of organizational environments, the cultural context, as crucial to explaining organizational structure or behavior. By crosstabulating member consensus and community consensus consistent predictions regarding survival, “character,” and goal behavior are achieved for a diverse range of case studies. It is suggested, therefore, that community consensus be treated as a common denominator in future attempts to ferret out the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with particular organizational structures and behaviors.