The Effects of Organizational Integration Into Informational Environments on Adoption of Innovation.

In the context of the rapid technological advance characteristic of post-industrial societies, organizational theorists have paid a great deal of attention to the problem of organizational change. One of the central issues in various analyses of the problem of change in general has been the observation that all organizations do not respond to changes in their environments in the same way. The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing studies of organizational response to change by focusing on the extent of organizational integration into informational environments. The approach used is based on a view of organizations as information processing systems and seeks to understand variability in adoption of innovation in terms of variability in extent of integration into informational environments. The principal hypothesis tested is that the greater the extent of an organization's integration into an informational environment, the more extensive will be its reponse to environmental change, that is, the more likely it will be to adopt innovations. Data from a national sample of hospitals are used to test the hypothesis. The measure of innovation is based on hospital responses regarding the presence or absence of 12 different new developments in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of respiratory disease. Findings support the principal hypothesis tested. (Author/DN)