ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE PRESSURES

Environment- systems theorists typically define the environment as anything that generates change pressures–information, energy, and matter inputs -on a system.

Environmental inputs to organization – public systems take many forms.

Examples:

Ø News reports about abuses by top executives at United Way – lavish lifestyles, high salaries, consulting fees paid to associates etc. has certainly affected the charity's relationships with donors and local United Way chapters. The impact was not limited to United Way, as all charities braced for a donor backlash, greater public scrutiny, and even government investigations of high salaries of non-profit organizations executives.

Ø Changes in educational levels and values of those entering the local workforce affect relationships between a local manufacturing company and labor unions, community groups, local government, and other employers in the area.

Ø Even “an insignificant leak” of radioactive water in a power utility's nuclear generating reactor puts stress on a utility's relationship with regulators, anti-nuclear citizen groups, and the financial community.

Ø The media coverage of protest groups picketing tuna-canning companies because their fishing practices killed dolphins. Almost immediately sales slumped, government scrutiny increased, children and parents alike erroneously accused the companies of killing “Flipper” for profit.

These examples illustrate that change pressures on organization–publics systems come from many types of environmental sources. In turn, organization-publics relationships change in response to these environmental pressures. If they do not change, old relationships will become dysfunctional because the organization acts and reacts in ways inappropriate to the new circumstances. If unmanaged, systems tend to degenerate to maximum disorder, what systems theorists call “entropy.”

Entropy- coordinated behavior to attain mutually beneficial goals is no longer possible. In effect, systems break up.

Public relations- is charged with keeping organizational relationships in tune with the mutual interests and goals of organizations and their publics.

SUBSYSTEMS AND SUPRAYSTEMS

A system has been identified as including the organization and its publics.

The organization is itself composed of a set of interacting units. From this perspective, the organization can also be viewed as a system. Because organizations exist in dynamic social settings, they must modify internal processes and restructure themselves in response to changing environments.

The systems perspective suggests that the level and definition of the system must be appropriate to the concern or the problem situation. A component – a subsystem – in one system may be itself analyzed as a system in another context. Likewise, a system defined as such for one purpose may be but a component or subsystem in a higher-order suprasystem when the reason for the analysis changes.

Ø For example, when reorganizing the local United Way's internal structure and programming, the organization is viewed as the system and the publics are viewed as parts of the environment. When the United Way scandal made the headlines however for some purposes, each of the 2,100 local United Way organizations and their publics became local systems within an even larger environmental context.

The latter level of systems analysis, as news of national United Way President William Aramony's high salary and extravagant lifestyle produced change pressures on all tax-exempt charitable, religious and educational groups and foundations.

Systems theorist James G. Miller uses the concept of higher-order systems to define a system's environment:

"The immediate environment is the suprasystem minus the system itself. The entire environment includes this plus the suprasystem and systems at all higher levels which contain it. In order to survive, the system must interact with and adjust to its environment, the other parts of the suprasystem."

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