Organization theory poorly explains established organizations successfully adapting to existential change

Evidence

First, for all the attention paid to political organizations and institutions, both recent organizational theory in sociology and historical institutionalist analyses in political science have emphasized resistance to change. Transformation is said to occur either at the margins (North 1990) or in dramatic “critical junctures” (Collier and Collier 1991), while population ecology models argued that the environment will simply reward certain forms of organization and winnow out others (Aldrich 1979, Scott 1992). There are few examinations of how established organizations survive and adapt successfully to environmental changes that often undermine the very grounds for their existence. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 91

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to the reader’s research question about communist successor parties: whether elites manufacture a new threat or decay when the constitutive external enemy vanishes — the ‘environmental change undermines the grounds of existence’ framing is exactly the post-1989 case. — connects to: Organization theory poorly explains how discredited institutions survive hostile change — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 91