Submitted by: Submitted by flash1
Views: 482
Words: 2628
Pages: 11
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 03/19/2011 10:45 AM
You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you towards your objective. Analyse your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back. (W Clement Stone. 2002)
In this assignment, I am going to examine whether Ryanair is a prisoner of or a master of its environment.
The business environment is in constant flux and companies must grapple with a host of new realities as cited in www.emeraldinsight.com.
Robert Duncan classified environments along two dimensions. The first is the rate of change of environments and the second dimension identified by Duncan is that of environmental complexity. (Duncan, 1972:313-27)
Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, both of the Harvard Business School, went beyond the work of Duncan; they sought to match the internal environments with the external environments. They looked at two different dimensions: differentiation and integration. (Harvard Business School, 1967). They argued that environments are not single elements but are composed of a number of elements. This theory was applied to the problems of renewing mature American industries whose competiveness has been internationally challenged. Airlines such as Ryanair face a complex environment because of the large number of environmental elements they face.
According to the population-ecology view the environment selects certain types of organisation to survive and other to perish based on the fit between their structural characteristics and the characteristics of their environment. I don’t think this is a very reliable view as it cannot provide managers in advance with actions that should be taken in order to improve the chances of an organisation’s survival.
“The specific environment is the part of the environment that is directly relevant to the organisation in achieving its goal” as cited in (Pyper, 2007:34).
It is very important that an organization...