This work explores how external constraints affect organizations and provides insights for designing and managing organizations to mitigate these constraints. All organizations are dependent on the environment for their survival. It contends that it is the fact of the organization's dependence on the environment that makes the external constraint and control of organizational behaviour both possible and almost inevitable. Organizations can either try to change their environments through political means or form interorganizational relationships to control or absorb uncertainty.

"Comprising more than 500 entries, the Encyclopedia of Research Design explains how to make decisions about research design, undertake research projects in an ethical manner, interpret and draw valid inferences from data, and evaluate experiment design strategies and results. Two additional features carry this encyclopedia far above other works in the field: bibliographic entries devoted to significant articles in the history of research design and reviews of contemporary tools, such as software and statistical procedures, used to analyze results. It covers the spectrum of research design strategies, from material presented in introductory classes to topics necessary in graduate research; it addresses cross- and multidisciplinary research needs, with many examples drawn from the social and behavioral sciences, neurosciences, and biomedical and life sciences; it provides summaries of advantages and disadvantages of often-used strategies; and it uses hundreds of sample tables, figures, and equations based on real-life cases."--Publisher's description.