Strategy, external communication and environmental context

It has long been argued that organizations must interact with their environments in order to survive. But is the nature of this interaction invariant across environmental contexts? This paper considers the importance of communication between organizations and key environmental elements to the development of organizational strategic norms. Based on a grounded theory framework of analysis, it is theorized that organizational strategic norms are negotiated with the environment in an interactive fashion, and that task environmental elements concerned with assessing organizations tend to employ evaluation processes that are broadly reflective of an organization's context. Views offinancial analysts and individual investors, elicited in both a quantitative and a qualitative form, are suggestive of the merits of this theorizing. Several implications for researchers and strategists are discussed.