Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to buffer environmental influences by surrounding their technical cores with input and output componen… - James D. Thompson

Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to smooth out input and output transactions.

Under norms of rationality, organizations seek to seal off their core technologies from environmental influences.

Most of our beliefs about complex organizations follow from one or the other of two distinct strategies. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment. A newer tradition enables us to conceive of the organization as an open system, indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty.

A central purpose of this book is to identify a framework which might link at important points several of the now independent approaches to the understanding of complex organizations.

The more sectors in which the organization subject to rationality norms is constrained; the more power the organization will seek over remaining sectors of its task environment... many constraints and unable to achieve power in other sectors of its task environment will seek to enlarge the task environment.