Gerald R. Salancik

“There is one word that best describes Jerry Salancik: mischievous. He was always full of mischief and brought an attitude and spirit of fun and playfulness to his research and colleagues that made life interesting and stimulating.”

“The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output.”

“The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded.”

“The term rationalize refers to any situations in which a person's action is described with reference to some supporting reason or cause. The term “legitimate” refers to one criterion by which rationalizations are selected from the many possible explanations for action. Justifications or rationalizations are selected primarily when they are acceptable explanations in a given social context. This means they fit with the facts as known according to the rules of behavior generally followed.”

“People as adaptive organisms adjust their behavior and beliefs to the social context and to the reality of their own past and present behavior and situation.”

“Success ruins everything.Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Christina T. Fong. "The business school ‘business’: Some lessons from the US experience." Journal of management studies 41.8 (2004): 1501-1520.”

“Commitment is a state of being in which an individual becomes bound by his actions and through this actions to beliefs that sustain his activities and his own involvement.”

“Two contributors to explicitness are the observability of the act and the unequivocality of the act. Some acts are not observable and we may know them only by inference from assumed consequences. You leave a dollar bill on a checkout counter, turn away for a moment, then find it missing. The consequence is obvious, but do you know if the customer next to you took it or if it was carried away by a draft from the open door? Acts themselves can be equivocal, forgotten, or otherwise intractable.”

“The most frequently encountered view of commitment in organizations is one having to do with an individual's psychological bond to the organization.”