Books in the Stanford Business Classics series

Cited for its answer to the question: under what conditions do organizations change?, this book uses an evolutionary model that captures the essential features of relations between organizations and their environments. This model explains organizational change by focusing on the processes of variation, selection, retention, and struggle.

Upon its publication in 1962, this book became one of the founding texts of organizational sociology. Bringing together diverse approaches, it presented a new focus of interest: the formal organization. This reissue, which includes a new introduction by Scott, makes this seminal work accessible to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

Private Management and Public Policy is a landmark work in the field of business and society. When it was first published in 1975, it introduced an alternative way of thinking about the management of social issues, emphasizing the critical role of business in the public policy process.

This work focuses on how organizations adapt to their environments, and introduces a theoretical framework composed of a dynamic adaptive cycle and an empirically based strategy typology showing four different types of adaptation.